Talk by Kali Rubaii

Taking war as a toxic structure, this talk begins at the belly of war, in Fallujah, Iraq. Rubaii's forensic ethnography between 2014 and 2024 traces weaponized metals from the sand and bodies of people in Fallujah back to their origins at war's jaws: mineral mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where such metals are extracted by artisanal miners for use by tech and weapons companies, and to the smelters of Rwanda and the US, where such minerals are refined and distributed. The talk also follows the post-battle life of weaponized metals to its tail, where these metals are recycled by Indian laborers in steel factories in Iraqi Kurdistan as a central part of the concrete industry; or to Colfax, Louisiana where they are destroyed in burn pits; and to Guam’s coral reef, where they are detonated. At each site, people are trapped in biochemically and socially toxic relations with components of weaponized earth. By tracing the toxic exposures people face at multiple sites of metal extraction, weaponization, reuse, and disposal, Rubaii’s talk identifies two key points about war's long chain of supply: 1) the many bodies and people whose lives are ravaged by warfare far from the site and dates of documented battles, and 2) locations for antiwar intervention in an increasingly diffuse network of corporate and contracted war-making.

Kali Rubaii is a cultural anthropologist at Purdue University whose scholarship focuses on displacement, health justice, and the environmental impacts of war. She is the author of Resurgency: Outlasting the War on Terror in Iraq and co-editor of The Social Properties of Concrete. She leads the Parts Per Million Project , an interdisciplinary, international team of researchers concerned with multi-generational health effects of environmental exposures from the war industry. She also co-leads the War and Geos project on military supply chains and the environmental legacies of warfare.