Abstract

This talk considers war-earth relations by journeying from the aftermaths of late modern war—bombed-out landscapes, depleted ecosystems, and public health crises—to the “beforemaths”, spaces that are under-studied yet instrumental in the preparatory phases of recent assaults by advanced militaries. At the targets of those assaults—e.g., Gaza, Lebanon, and Iraq—military operations carried out by US-led coalitions and Israel have left harmful residues in the landscape, typically the heavy metals of munitions that seep and leach in the earth. Those metals are, of course, extracted from the earth, often at similar cost to ecological and human health. For instance, weapons companies source raw materials from the DRC and Rwanda where mining communities are subject to similar patterns of long-term harm as those in Gaza and Iraq. This is a beforemath of war, a site of military violence that reveals a doubly destructive relation between war and earth where practices of extracting and depositing minerals distribute widespread violence across large tracts of the planet.