Health and Environmental Tolls of Protracted Conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa

The effects of conflict on public health and ecosystem well-being are understudied and rarely figure in public debates about war-making. Protracted conflicts are particularly damaging to people and environments in ways that are inadequately documented. In recent wars in the Middle East and North Africa, parties to the conflicts have induced hunger and displacement and undermined public health through the use of violence and economic policies that deprive civilians of access to food, water, fuel, and livelihoods. Environmental pollution is widespread, particularly in cities that became war zones, while the COVID-19 pandemic has deepened conflict-induced poverty and food insecurity.

Book Review [Mosul: Australia’s Secret War Inside the ISIS Caliphate]

This is a book review of the book by Ben McKelvey (2020), Mosul: Australia’s Secret War Inside the ISIS Caliphate, Hachette Australia. Published by - Hachette Australia (Sydney, 2020) Format - Paperback ISBN - 978-0-7336-4541-9 339 pages Reviewed by John Battersby 'Mosul: Australia’s Secret War Inside the ISIS Caliphate' looks at parallel paths in the Al Qaeda (AQ) and ISIS inspired conflicts of the 2000s. On the one hand, it looks at those who were lured by AQ and ISIS propaganda into conceiving plots in Australia (a number were caught in the Pendennis operation), while another killed a civilian employee in October 2015 and several others left Australia to fight in Iraq and Syria in the period of ISIS’s ascendency. At the same time McKelvey relates the coinciding story lines of a number of Australian special forces personnel who were deployed to Afghanistan in 2001 and after 2003 (including the mid-2010s) to Iraq. Their exploits are detailed, the rationale for their deployment and operations is given, and light is shone on the consequences for those individuals personally. It is too often the fate of those who give their loyalty and commitment to their country, to discover that their country seldom reciprocates in equal measure. The inconsequential occasional mis-demeanours by highly disciplined servicemen that offend the sensibilities of their higher commanders were punished harshly, and the enormous personal and psychological toll that inevitably falls on individuals deployed to war-zones has not been adequately addressed by Australia. Service personnel surviving war zones to commit suicide when they come home is not an acceptable outcome of these deployments.

Spatial and temporal thresholds in installation art: Jan van der Merwe’s Eclipse

The notion of thresholds and their potential to suggest liminality is usually associated with spatialities. However, I contend this notion can be extended to layered temporal thresholds and temporal liminalities. I present this argument, using postclassical narratological concepts as theoretical framework, with reference to the South African artist Jan van der Merwe’s installation artwork Eclipse (2002). In this work, various spatial thresholds can be distinguished that relate to issues of conflict, mourning, exclusion, surveillance and the suggestion of death. This is achieved by means of a no man’s land experienced when entering the artwork, where the viewer-participant finds him or herself compelled to follow a footpath surrounded by barbed wire on which clothes made of rusted metal are suspended. This journey culminates in a wall that presents three screens showing rose petals being dropped, as if into a grave. Various possible places suggest themselves: refugee camps, concentration camps, war zones and a cemetery. I argue that these spatialities are made possible by temporal thresholds that accompany them. Apart from the patina of the rusted material that suggest the passing of time, the moving flower petals in the screens repeat constantly to create not only liminal temporalities in terms of the artwork at large, but also an iterative sense of the ongoing culmination of these temporalities in death. Opsomming Die idee van drempels en hul potensiaal om die liminale te suggereer word tipies met ruimtelikhede geassosieer. Desnieteenstaande voer ek aan dat hierdie gedagte verbreed kan word na gelaagde tydmatige drempels en tydmatige liminaliteite. Ek bied hierdie argument vanuit die kader van postklassieke narratologie as teoretiese raamwerk en met verwysing na die Suid-Afrikaanse kunstenaar Jan van der Merwe se installasiekunswerk Eclipse (2002). In hierdie werk kan ʼn aantal tydmatige drumpels onderskei word wat telkens kwessies van konflik, bewening, uitsluiting, dophou en die suggestie van dood aan die hand doen. Dit word bewerkstelling deur die ervaring van ʼn niemandsland wanneer die kunswerk betree word, omdat die aanskouer-deelnemer noodgedwonge ʼn voetpaadjie moet volg wat deur doringdraad omhul is en waarop klere wat uit geroeste metaal gesuspendeer is. Hierdie reis kulmineer in ʼn muur waarop drie skerms gemonteer het wat roosblare toon, asof in ʼn graf. Daar word gesinspeel op verskeie moontlike plekke: vlugtelingkampe, konsentrasiekampe, oorloggebiede en ʼn begraafplaas. Ek voer aan dat hierdie ruimtelikhede moontlik gemaak word deur tydmatige drumpels wat hand aan hand met die ruimtes gesuggereer word. Benewens die patina van die geroeste materiaal wat verband hou met die verloop van tyd, stel die herhalende beweging van die blomblare in die skerms ook liminale tydsfere aan die orde binne die kunswerk as geheel, en dryf ook – op iteratiewe wyse – hierdie tydsfere op die spits om ʼn suggestie van die dood aan die hand te doen.

6 PTSD and war photo journalists

War journalism is becoming increasingly dangerous. Journalists who define their careers by longevity in war zones have a lifetime prevalence of PTSD similar to frontline combat veterans. Local journalists can also confront grave danger, but unlike foreign correspondents, they work and live in dangerous places. They too have rates of PTSD and depression that well exceed that seen in the general population. Local journalists whose families are targeted are particularly vulnerable in this regard. Journalists who chose these dangerous career paths differ cognitively from their colleagues who have chosen less adventurous careers, most notably when it comes to decisions that entail risk. The ability to manage anxiety and fear in extreme situations may to a degree be modulated by epigenetic factors.

Cannons and Codes

War often appears to be definitionally outside the realm of structures such as law and literature. When we speak of war, we often understand it as incapable of being rendered into rules or words. Lawyers struggle to fit the horrors of the battlefield, the torture chamber, or the makeshift hospital filled with wounded and dying civilians into the framework of legible rules and shared understandings that law assumes and demands. In the West’s centuries-long effort to construct a formal law of war, the imperative has been to acknowledge the inhumanity of war while resisting the conclusion that it need therefore be without law. Writers, in contrast, seek to find the human within war—an individual story, perhaps even a moment of comprehension. Law and literature might in this way be said to share imperialist tendencies where war is concerned: toward extending their dominion to contain what might be uncontainable. This volume on war is the sixth in the University of Chicago Law School’s Law and Literature series. The papers are intended to address the many ways in which war affects human society and the many groups of people whose lives are affected by war. Some of the papers concern the lives of soldiers; others focus on civilians living in war zones who are caught up in the conflict; still others address themselves to the home front, far from the theater of war. By collecting such diverse perspectives within one volume, we hope to examine how literature has reflected the totalizing nature of war and the ways in which it distorts law across domains.