What can war teach all of us about how to think, act, and feel when our worlds are devastated? As people from all walk of life are considering how to survive ecological disaster, what routes to repair are possible? Perhaps one of the best places to ask these questions is Anbar, Iraq. Here, decades of military violence have completely transformed the possibilities for plants, people, animals, and landscapes to coexist as they have before. It is here that Kali Rubaii situates three main arguments based on her ethnographic research, conducted in 2014-2015: First, Counterterrorism is not just about military strategy, but also a set of environmental conditions that kill relations among beings. Second, political violence is an assault on multispecies survival, and therefore social and environmental justice are inseparable. Third, repair might not be about peaceable restoration, but instead reorientation to the future that makes room for antagonism as a prevailing mode of relationality.
