his paper examines the ways in which Morocco’s Sahara Desert has long been a fetishized site of transformation. From the French colonial administration’s dam-making project to make the desert a site of energy and agriculture to the current techno-scientific imaginings of its potential to fuel the energy dependent country into modernity. These imaginaries have led to the slow death and the invisible dispossession of the livelihoods of small-scale subsistence farmers in the Draa Valley region wherein many long-standing sustainable farming practices are being threatened or have completed ‘died’ due to state-sanctioned resource allocation that privileges large scale energy development projects over farmers’ access to water. As such, this paper elucidates the ways in which the slow death and invisible dispossession of small-scale farmers’ access to water and thus their livelihood, is a result of international funding organizations and the Moroccan government’s continuous capitalist fetishism of the Sahara Desert as a gateway to Moroccan modernity.

The Politics of Sacrifice and Nature Restoration in the Çoruh Valley This paper provides a critical ethnographic examination of the politics of environmental sacrifice and restoration in a town submerged under Turkey’s tallest dam, the Yusufeli Dam, built on the Çoruh River. While existing research on sacrifice zones sheds light on environmental justice struggles against racialized, gendered, and class-based power structures that render certain places as sacrificial, less attention has been given to the experiences of historically marginalized communities perpetuating sacrificial narratives about the environment. In the Çoruh Basin, valley residents employ and mobilize the trope of self-sacrifice in their lived experience of submergence under dam waters. Within this context, state officials and engineers claim to compensate for the sacrifice through nature restoration projects. This paper focuses on one such environmental effort: the salvage of fertile soils and local fruit trees from the valley and their relocation to the resettlement site. Drawing on insights from the anthropology of ruination and the political ecology of restoration and repair, I will show that rather than compensating for and mitigating environmental sacrifice, state-led nature restoration projects is bound up with the process of ruination that is rendered inevitable.

Garbage can be a highly mobilizing political object. When waste infrastructure breaks down – whether due to state failure, collective action, environmental crises, or some combination of these forces – waste disrupts the flow of everyday life. Piles of rubbish are noticeable, not only as a visible marker of disorder, but also as odorous and viscerally revulsive offenses to the senses. As Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins illustrates, exposure to waste can closely index governance levels in a given territory (2019, 4). But what about the costs of systems operating exactly as designed? Even when waste is invisible and unnoticeable to some, its management may still rely on structural violence. In this paper, I argue for attention to waste and systems of discarding not only in moments of disruption but also in times and spaces of structured cleanliness. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at three consecutive UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP) events and interviews with actors in states that have hosted the COP, I lay out a framework of “sanitization,” in which contentious objects like waste are rendered discursively and materially nonpolitical. Focusing on the waste practices in Sharm el-Sheikh and in Dubai during COP27 and COP28 respectively, I show how subjectivities shape experiences of waste and its management and how local actors can coopt, leverage, and resist sanitization.

In the name of urgent repair, the postwar reconstruction industry in Iraq is accelerated by environmental and labor deregulation, corruption schemes, and rapid extraction resulting in a range of environmental and health impacts on communities like Bazian Valley in northern Iraq. Based on periodic ethnographic fieldwork between 2014 and 2023 following the concrete industry and its twin, weapons-recycled rebar, this talk explores the environmental devastation of a single place as it bears the burdens of post-war reconstruction in Iraq. In Bazian Valley, cement mining and concrete production are accompanied by “green” innovations like weapons “recycling” into rebar. Weapons recycling epitomizes the violence of “green” efforts by laying bear how ecological violence is perpetuated through the redistribution of toxic materials through the air, water, and soil; and how bodily harm is experienced through working and living conditions shaped by the heat, dust, and noise of such an enterprise. While the nature of violence in this location has shifted over time, the materials that make up the post-war reconstruction industry (dynamite, munitions shells, cement) are themselves directly linked to US military invasion, base making, and policy-making in ways that make the legacy of the War on Terror forensically traceable and ecologically palpable.