Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies and Kin

According to Tufts professor Kimberly Theidon, war can live “under the skin,” and into the land, rivers and mountains that are more than a mute backdrop to humanly-authored devastation.  It is clear that armed conflict can contribute to an environment that is toxic to human health and well-being, but to leave the argument there is to reduce more-than-human entities to mere resources that exist to satisfy human needs and desires, and to measure their destruction as unfortunate but collateral damage. Professor Theidon moves beyond this instrumentalized concern for the more-than-human to consider the interspecies entanglements that make life possible in the best and the worst of times.  She considers the multiple environments in which conception, pregnancy and childbirth unfold, environments that may lie far beyond the control of any one woman.  From toxic chemicals to land mines, from rivers tinged with blood to angry mountains, there are multiple environments and actors that play a role in reproduction and post-war reconstruction. To capture these assemblages, she takes her audience to the Atrato River, Colombia’s longest and most-polluted waterway.  On this river, lifeways and waterways converge; as the Atrato winds through the Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities of Urabá, the river gives and is life. In recognition of the multiple forms of violence that have convulsed the region and muddied the river’s waters, in 2016 the Colombian Constitutional Court ruled that the Atrato both is a victim of the armed conflict and a river with rights.  For Theidon, surely it is time to consider the human and more-than-human wages of war, and to foreground the articulation of environmental and post-humanist conceptions of justice.