For many Marsh Arabs, the past decades of war and extraction have become the very environment in which they live. Everyday struggles against aridity, waste, polluted air, dust, and toxicity are defining features of war ecologies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Mesopotamian Marshlands across the borderlands of Iran and Iraq, this project explores the attunements, sensibilities, collective imaginaries, and knowledge production surrounding what is considered repair in the face of war destruction and the decay caused by sanctions. It examines atmospheric surroundings—air, dust, and drought—to theorize ecological reparation not merely as modes of adaptation but as an atmospheric problem-space that demarcates the limits of environmental injustice and acknowledges how impacted communities craft collective ways of living together. I will show how, in recent decades, the oil-rich marshlands have become a laboratory for ecological experiments shaped by the devastation of war and the pressures of sanctions. In these zones, engineers, scientists, environmental activists, farmers, and traders cooperate and compete in efforts to combat dust storms. Dust becomes here a vector for new modes of living that have emerged in the shadow of conflict and climatic upheaval. By making the air visible as a hazardous element, dust becomes entangled with respiratory subjectivities and exploratory policies.
DR. SANA CHAVOSHIAN
CURRICULUM VITAE
Sana Chavoshian is a historical and environmental anthropologist who has held a position at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin since 2021. Previously, she worked for five years at the Multiple Secularities Centre for Advanced Studies at Leipzig University, where she also earned her PhD. She studies how people experiment with, adapt to, commemorate, and politicize “impure” environments in the aftermath of war and sanctions. She has extensive experience conducting ethnographic fieldwork in war environments in Iran and Iraq. Her focus spans war ecology, reparational discourses and practices, atmospheres, the anthropology of Islam, and material religion. Her book Women, Martyrs and Stones in Iran’s Post-War Politics (Edinburgh University Press), set to be published in 2025, explores how mothers and wives of Iran-Iraq war martyrs honour their memories in pious circles, dreams, cemeteries, and pilgrimage to the former battlefields. Currently she is the co-spokesperson of the MENA Middle East and North Africa region in the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology.
