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T-walls in Iraq: Militarized Landscaping and Environmental Estrangement
Abstract
Used in counterinsurgency, base-making, and rapid landscape transformation, t-walls are a military technology with transnational reach. These blast-proof concrete segments, integral to wartime segregation in Europe, were later introduced to the Middle East to generate "ideal" landscapes for pacifying insurgency in Palestine, Iraq, and Kurdistan. T-walls, introduced to the Iraqi landscape in 2003 as a core technology in the War on Terror. As a material artifact of divide and conquer policies, t-walls have accompanied intensified modalities of spatialized policing, garrisoned safety enclaves, siege warfare, and deadly restrictions on mobility in Iraq. This paper is based upon ethnographic interviews and travel with internally displaced Anbari farmers in 2014 and 2015, whose encounters with t-walls are illustrative of much broader displacement from their land and crops. Sandwiched between multiple entities scrambling for geopolitical control in Anbar, families crossed a regional border into the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan for refuge. However, Anbari men sometimes traveled back and forth illegally to maintain farms or fight in militias. As they travel across newly made internal borders between Iraqi Kurdistan where they seek refuge from military violence, and Anbar province, where their crops and land need tending, their interface with t-walls and checkpoints shapes their ability to maintain intimacy with their farmland. T-walls are often theorized as a barrier technology that segregates spaces and produces or concretizes borders. This paper argues that, rather that mark the edge, such concrete artifacts mark the middle of occupied territories, pulling symbolic, material, and political attention to loci of militarism and the environments it produces. T-walls are, therefore, ecological figures that symbolize much broader impacts of displacement and environmental estrangement in the long wake of the War on Terror.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Iraq
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries