Living on the Frontline: Indeterminacy, Value, and Military Waste in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina

Abstract

More than 5,000 people around the world are injured or killed every year by landmines and unexploded ordnance, whether in active or former zones of conflict. This article explores how the after effects of war, materialised in military waste (unexploded landmines, shrapnel and bullets), transform forms of life in a post-war polity. It elucidates how the ongoing presence of military waste radically transforms the environment and the very conditions of liveability for those who dwell in such spaces many years after the actual conflict has finished. Situated in impoverished rural areas of postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, I offer an ethnographic elucidation of the social life of military waste and its entanglement in people's attempts to remake livelihoods and reengage with their environment in the aftermath of the Bosnian war (1992)(1993)(1994)(1995) that has resulted in pervasive politicisation and privatisation of social redistribution, and has given rise to an unprecedented degree of precarity. My aim is to document how the ongoing presence of landmines and military waste renders the landscape and peoples' livelihoods not only radically uncertain and distressing but also often indeterminate, and thus open to the generation of unexpected forms of engagement, cohabitation, and value creation. By treating military waste as indeterminate, I ask what forms, practices, and potential for value creation military waste engenders in a particular spatio-temporal configuration of postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. By tracking the emerging activities surrounding land use and value creation in timber forest contaminated by military waste, I show how this invisibly dangerous landscape gives rise to new ways of engaging with the forest's economic potential vis-à-vis economic precarity in the postwar period. Ultimately, the article suggests how the subjective experience of fear gives rise to multiple modes of valuation, for people whose lives and the surrounding environment are mediated by experiences and remainders of conflict.

Life in an age of death: War and the river in Bosnia and Herzegovina

“…7 Furthermore, escaping into what we call "nature"-such as fleeing into forests and walking across treacherous mountains to escape life under siege, genocide, and persecution-is well documented in numerous personal accounts of war and survival (see, among others, Nuhanović 2019; Suljagić 2005) 8 . Extending this "danger of nature" into the postwar period, and pushing against recent enthusiasm about multispecies economies, Henig (2019) illustrates the risks that Bosnia's beautiful mountains-still sprinkled with largely invisible and deadly unexploded ordnances-present to those who are forced to make a living from them. While many of these complex material, social, and environmental aspects of war and postwar sociality have been discussed in several anthropological studies, the story of people discovering meaning and experiencing joy with and in "nature" during war is largely nonexistent in anthropological scholarship.…”

Introduction: Afterlives in objects

“…Coping with toxicity in the context of chemical waste and plastics became a hotspot for those thinking about and struggling for environmental justice (Sarathy et al, 2018;Parotte, 2021). Simultaneously, toxic material afterlives have played a key role in studies of military disposal (Bendix, 2022;Henig, 2019), and, especially, nuclear waste and "the nuclear uncanny" (Masco, 2006). On the other hand, contemporary struggles for decolonization grapple with the question of what to do with the political potency of the material remains of colonial and imperial power regimes (Raikovich, 2021;Stoler, 2013).…”

Living with landmines: Inhabiting a war-altered landscape

“…She invites a focus on how mines and humans cohabit post-war landscapes and the ‘unanticipated effects and relations’ these mines create (p. 163). In a similar vein of analysis, Henig (2019) has proposed that military waste can render engagements with the landscape indeterminate in a way that both threatens human life and allows for precarious new forms of engagement and value creation, specifically income generation.…”

“…In the years since the fieldwork for this article was completed, a subset of anthropological scholarship on military waste has emerged, theorizing war-altered landscapes (Henig, 2012(Henig, , 2019Kim, 2016;Zani, 2018Zani, , 2019. Former battlefields contain both organic materials and inorganic war debris, creating a particularly unstable type of terrain where the remnants of war may be dangerously active, partially degraded or inert (Filipucci, 2004;Henig, 2012).…”