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.