ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Necro-geographies: Extractive Beforemaths and Ecological Afterlives of War

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

English Abstract

This interdisciplinary roundtable shifts the field’s perspectives to necro-geographies by advancing a critical analysis of the relationship between geos and death. It explores overlapping histories of knowledge, commodification, and conflict and grapples with the ecology of war and militarization across multiple scales and temporalities. With case studies ranging from Kurdistan and the Caucasus to Hebridean and Himalayan frontiers, our analysis spans the nineteenth century to the present. Indeed, our critique is compelled by witnessing contemporary wars that seek not only to control territory but also to “extend, suspend, and dictate the tempo of killing” (Omar 2025). Meanwhile, hyper-militarized climate crisis and food insecurity emerge as structures of an “eco-apartheid” arguably designed to render growing parts of the globe uninhabitable and safeguard imperial interests (Kolinjivadi and Ashraf 2024). This roundtable brings the history of science to bear on these entangled crises through a discussion of environmental and armed violence that reckons both with the “beforemaths” and the “afterlives” of war (Griffiths and Rubaii 2025; Ihar 2026). This involves close scrutiny of knowledge systems and territorial techniques deployed to mark particular places and bodies for extraction, siege, “collateral damage,” or death.

Five speakers therefore discuss plural, contested worlds of militarized science and environmental violence. Mining sites, which yield the stuff of munitions, appear in Northern Kurdistan and in Assam and Burma to produce racialized geographies of incarceration, ethnic conflict, and uninhabitability. These scenes raise questions about when war begins and ends, as mines became flashpoints of later conflict or show fossil colonialism as a multi-species catastrophe. Similarly, state violence on forests and agriculture in Syria and the Caucasus invite questions about the parameters or “poetics” of genocide—and about Indigenous resistance to it. Insurgent ways of knowing range in scope from Kurdish environmentalism to the use of sentinel organisms to register the multi-scalar violence of the Military-Industrial Complex.

Sub Unit

• Roundtable

Chair

• Lauren Dempster

Participants

• Zsuzsanna Ihar, University of Cambridge

• Pinar Dinç, Lund University

Session Organizers

• Patrick Anthony

• Shreya Khaund, Warwick University