Leah Zani

Joshua Reno

Darcie DeAngelo

Rebecca Kastleman

Demilitarizing the Future draws from art, anthropology, and activism to investigate the entrenchment of militarism in everyday lives and to consider novel imaginaries of its dissolution. The pieces collected in this anthology track across military training camps in the United States, the tenements of Palestine, and other sites in the global networks of warfare and military preparedness to consider the pathways by which more equitable futures might be envisioned and sustained. Representing fields from anthropology to poetry and from literary studies to community organizing, the authors together weave a multidisciplinary collection of creative scholarship. Rather than presuming that the aftermath of war requires the reimposition of new military infrastructures, the collection speaks to the socially and artistically generative potentialities of military waste infrastructures as well as their enduring toxicities. Militarism and preparedness for war undergirds the infrastructure and design of everyday lives across the globe and its satellites, but the processes of demilitarization offer their own affordances. Within this collection, the authors broaden our understanding of militarization to examine its excesses and their repurposing toward demilitarized futures.

Demilitarizing the Future

Catherine Alexander

For some, recycling is a big business; for others a moralised way of engaging with the world. But, for many, this is a dangerous way of earning a living. With scrap now being the largest export category from the US to China, the sheer scale of this global trade has not yet been clearly identified or analysed. Combining fine-grained ethnographic analysis with overviews of international material flows, Economies of Recycling radically changes the way we understand global and local economies as well as the new social relations and identities created by recycling processes. Following global material chains, this groundbreaking book reveals astonishing connections between persons, households, cities and global regions as objects are reworked, taken to pieces and traded. With case studies from Africa, Latin America, South Asia, China, the former Soviet Union, North America and Europe, this timely collection debunks common linear understandings of production, exchange and consumption and argues for a complete re-evaluation of North-South economic relationships.

Joshua Reno

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