Environcide and the Materiality of Memory Sites in Post-WWII (Counter)Insurgency Wars in the Global South

Weekly internal seminar by Emmanuel Kreike, historian, Princeton, and 2022-2023 Paris IAS Fellow.

Communication discussed by Sebastian Grevsmühl, chargé de recherche au CNRS, Centre de recherches historiques (EHESS - CNRS).

Presentation

The impact of war on rural society/environment especially in the global south has been ignored causing (1)agricultural underdevelopment; (2)outmigration; (3) climate crisis. A key factor is how the overlapping nested conceptual binaries Nature-Culture/Primitive-Civilized/Non-West-West/Rural-Urban shape (re-)imaginations of pasts and presents through history and memory work: because the rural global south is presumed to live in and by Nature, post-disaster recovery is not problematized. I focus on the direct and indirect impact of war practices on ways of life and livelihoods in the short and long terms highlighting both material and immaterial recovery. I use a selection of Cold War insurgencies, including the Indonesian Independence War, the French Indochina and Algerian Wars, the Biafran War, and the Liberation and Civil Wars in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and South Africa. My talk discusses three cases in detail, highlighting the limits/potential of specific sources and methods:

(1)Military archives about practices in the field: 1945-1950 Indonesian “Jungle war” example based on archive of the Dutch Marine Brigade: field orders, patrol reports, interrogation & sitreps. “Perpetrator” view: written textual, qualitative, contemporary dating.

(2)Oral history: “abandoned homes and forest refuges” example 1967-1970 Biafran War based on 60 life histories recorded in Summer 2022 in Nigeria. “Survivors” (post)war narratives, audio, qualitative, interactive/dynamic, past/present ambiguities.

(3)Aerial photos: 1968-1989 Namibian “Bush War” based on time series archival analogue greyscale photos: digitized, georeferenced (GIS) and mosaiced. AI/Machine Learning feature data extraction and processing. “Scientific” and “Big Data” of qualitative nature, spatial and visual (Bird’s Eye view) depicting changes settlement and land use/vegetation patterns with “hard” chronology and locality.