Scholarship

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: 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.  

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://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5021472 

DESCRIPTION:  

This is a call to action that is signed by 82 scholars. The commentary focuses on the environmental effects of Israel’s military attacks on Gaza. It calls on the environmental health community to speak out within their respective institutions, advocate for divestment from war-fuelling industries, and protect their early-career scholars who speak out in support of social and environmental justice and a ceasefire.