Scholarship
Researchers on the War & Geos project have published work in a range of academic journals that furthers understandings of the ecological legacies of contemporary warfare. All of the following is freely available using the links provided (please email mark.griffiths@ncl.ac.uk if you do not have access)
Authors: Kali Rubaii, Mohamed El-Shewy, Mark Griffiths
LINK: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096262982500157X
The article develops a simple but important argument: “conflict free” minerals are essential to the waging of contemporary war. This argument is substantiated over three main sections. First, we provide historical background to the idea of “conflict minerals” to show how they are narrowly associated with the violence of extraction and with consumer products (phones, electric vehicles, etc) in way that forecloses their use in weapons manufacturing and war further along the supply chain. Second, we draw from fieldwork in Rwanda and secondary sources to explicate the ways that minerals attain “conflict free” certification despite documented links with conflict in central Africa. Transparency in supply chains, we show, is carefully angled: issues of provenance (i.e., the movement of minerals to and in Rwanda) are obscured yet meticulous systems are in place to enable and trace the movement of minerals from Rwanda. In the third section, we focus on the supply of tin and tantalum from Rwanda to weapons suppliers and outline the use of those minerals in contemporary military hardware. In conclusion we sketch an agenda for future research on “conflict free” minerals that go to war.
Authors: Mohamed El-Shewy, Mark Griffiths, and Craig Jones
LINK: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/anti.13094
FULL TEXT IN ARABIC: https://www.madarcenter.org/index.php?preview=1&option=com_dropfiles&format=&task=frontfile.download&catid=2159&id=2040&Itemid=1000000000000
DESCRIPTION:
This article sets out lines of international complicity in Israel’s war on Gaza. It aims to establish not merely a refreshed agenda for research but also strategic sites of accountability and intervention. The article surveys Israeli military activities in Gaza, drawing focus on three key points of international military collaboration: the F-16 fighter jet; the GBU type bomb; and the weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems. We also highlight multiple other geographies of exchange that are visible through a global frame, including military aid, ideological support, and the deployment of military personnel from overseas. This research substantiates an argument that Israeli military violence in Gaza depends on a global network of supply, demand, and complicity whose extraneous relationship with the state indicates politically urgent sites of critical inquiry and intervention.
This article formed the base of a report we submitted to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 in response to a call for information on the involvement of weapons manufacturers in the occupation of Palestine.
Authors: Mark Griffiths and Kali Rubaii
LINK: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09670106241265636
DESCRIPTION:
Here we develop the idea that late modern war’s relationship with the geos (the ground and the life it sustains) is doubly destructive. While part of this is recognised in a recent focus on slow violence and ecological aftermaths, there is little consideration of the “beforemath”, or the sites of extraction that make advanced military technologies possible. Drawing attention to mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), we connect military technologies to arms manufacturers and their use of extracted minerals (e.g. cobalt, tantalum, copper). Shared patterns of environmental and public health effects across parts of Iraq, Gaza and the DRC indicate the doubly destructive nature of late modern war’s relationship with the geos: toxic materials threaten life after war as the deposits of bombardment and before war as mineral commodities at the beginning of arms supply chains. The article explicates how a perspective from the beforemath radically refigures the ways we think about war and spatiality, temporality, and the range of bodies affected in ways that promise a fuller understanding of the violence distributed by practices of late modern war.
Authors: Kali Rubaii and Mark Griffiths
LINK: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00187259.2024.2429998?src=exp-la#abstract
DESCRIPTION
In this article we ask three questions: How are we to conceptualise “clean-up” in the context of war’s toxicity? How does war appear from the perspective of clean-up? And thus, how are we led to more critical understandings of war’s violence in a “post-war” period? We address these questions via examples from fieldwork on post-war clean-up in Iraq, arguing that post-war clean-up does not reduce harm but instead defers and disperses military violence. This prompts, we further argue, critical intervention around three key themes: the bodies of war, the materials of war, and the time-spaces of war. In conclusion we emphasise the urgency of understanding clean-up as a harmful and constitutive aspect of war.
Authors: Ahlam Abuawad, Mark Griffiths, Graham Edwards, Adan Eftekhari, Mohammed El-Ebweini, Husam Al-Najar, Abeer Butmeh, Rasha Abu Dayyeh, Mohamed El-Shewy, Amira Aker
LINK: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2025.308140
DESCRIPTION:
This essay examines the resulting environmental health conditions in Gaza since October 2023. Evidence is drawn from international agency reports and peer-reviewed literature to document destruction and public health impacts over 18 months. Key themes include water, sanitation, contamination, noise and air pollution, food insecurity, susceptible populations, health system collapse, and trauma. Palestinians are beset with a public health crisis resulting from targeted environmental destruction. Water shortages and sewage contamination increase dehydration, famine, and disease. Air pollution from explosives and waste burning exposes residents to toxins. Waste management has collapsed, heightening disease outbreaks, including polio. Agricultural land is devastated, and food security is threatened with the aid blockade. Power grid destruction has crippled essential services. The health care system’s collapse further exacerbates risks, especially for susceptible populations. In addition to mental and physical trauma, cultural and identity loss are immeasurable.
Author: Mark Griffiths
LINK: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03091325211064266
DESCRIPTION:
The information in this article is the basis for the War & Geos project. It attends to connections between serious health conditions (cancers and congenital disorders) and weapons residues in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Gaza to develop a geographical agenda for examining power in late modern war from the perspective of the ground and the life it sustains. The article forwards a case for understanding the time-spaces of war as not compressed, vertical or remote but enduring, terranean and proximate in which violence emerges through processes (carcinogenic and teratogenic) that transcend boundaries between ‘life’ (bios) and ‘nonlife’ (geos).
Author: Mark Griffiths
LINK: https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tran.70049
DESCRIPTION:
While the majority of geographical work on colonialism in Palestine centres on territory and land, this article foregrounds geopower and geos in the making of spatial relations. Three arguments are made over three corresponding sections. The first draws on recent writing on geopower and geos (primarily that by Elizabeth Grosz, Elizabeth Povinelli and Kathryn Yusoff) that addresses the idea that political order and subjectivities grow from geological formations and life/non-life divisions. Following this work, I make an argument with obvious significance for geographers: the geos is a theoretically under-explored spatial unit that may predicate manifold spatial relations (e.g., the practices and politics that produce ‘land’ or ‘territory’). The second section considers historical accounts of early Zionist and Israeli settlement to show how geopower underpins the conceptualisation of Palestinian space as alternatively life-sustaining or life-threatening in ways that predicate the sequester of land and territorial claims. The stakes are not merely historical or theoretical: the third section focuses on three contemporary sites—(i) the war-affected soils of Gaza, (ii) the cultivation of olive trees in the West Bank (iii) and practices of agri-resistance in Bethlehem—to explicate how geopower and geos remain central to ongoing colonial control and struggles in Palestine.
Authors: Mark Griffiths and Henry Redwood
LINK: https://academic.oup.com/ips/article/18/2/olae011/7644469?searchresult=1
DESCRIPTION:
An article that works towards ontology of war centered on the life of the planet, or geos. We note a disciplinary tendency in International Relations (IR) to focus on the makers of war and ask: what if our analyses of war begin not with the technologies of killing but with the life that is targeted? In response we identify a “militarised ontology” of war that forms through the ways that militaries and scholars figure violence as spatially and temporally “precise” and thus distinct from longer-term environmental effects. Writing against such ontological contingencies, we set out a theoretical path for knowing war on different terms – from the perspective of the geos – that emphasise not a primarily accelerated, aerial, or remote activity but rather an enduring, terranean, and proximate intervention in the environment and the life it sustains.
