Introduction
Ecologies of Violence: Heritage and Conflict in More-than-Human Worlds (2023–2026) (hereafter EoV) is an international and interdisciplinary project exploring the lasting impacts of armed conflict and state violence on both humans and more-than-humans. Using archaeological, historical and ethnographic methods—including field visits, photography, archival research, 3D scanning, interviews and artistic interventions—alongside vitalist theoretical approaches, the project examines how the (im)material traces of violence endure in human and more-than-human ecologies and sociospatial zones of exclusion. These challenge dominant heritage practices and call for a broader and more inclusive understanding of heritage in the Anthropocene.
Central to the project is the concept of ‘ecologies of violence’—the entangled relations among human and more-than-human actors in (post)conflict settings. These assemblages—comprising soil, water, air, animals, metals, toxins and ideologies—co-produce dynamic but often harmful legacies that challenge linear post-conflict recovery narratives. They do so by exposing the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon Reference Nixon2011) of environmental degradation and its lasting material and sociopolitical effects.
Case studies
EoV focuses on three case studies that, while historically and geopolitically distinct, present materially and conceptually interconnected ecologies of violence.
In Paraguay, the project examines the socioecological consequences of infrastructural development and agricultural expansion during and after the Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989). Heavy investment in road construction and hydroelectric dams facilitated the integration of remote forested areas into the global soy market as well as the forced displacement of Indigenous communities and the destruction of the Atlantic Forest. Under the guise of ‘progress’ and ‘conservation’, these transformed landscapes became state-controlled exclusion zones (Figure 1), where both people and more-than-human ecologies were rendered subordinate to extractive and colonial logics.
Soy field with a small patch of surviving Atlantic Forest in Eastern Paraguay (figure by author).
The Laos case study explores the lingering impacts of the US bombing campaign during the Secret War (1964–1973). With an estimated 30 per cent of the country still contaminated by unexploded ordnance (UXO) and defoliant chemicals, large swaths of land remain unsafe for agriculture or habitation (Figure 2). These de facto exclusion zones intersect with patterns of climate vulnerability, which further compound the risks and hardships faced by local populations. The persistence of war pollution embodies not only the physical remnants of armed conflict but also the structural perpetuation of colonial violence, which continues to shape the ecological and social realities of the region (see Breithoff Reference Breithoff2025).
One of countless unexploded BLU-26/B ‘bombies’ left in north-eastern Laos (figure by author).
In France, the focus turns to the zone rouge (red zone) near Vimy, which is a patch of fenced-off forest along the old Western Front that is deemed too geographically and ecologically annihilated and contaminated for human occupation (Figure 3). This area serves as a focal point for examining the conservation and management of First World War military heritage and its enduring effects on contemporary agricultural landscapes. The project investigates how the Vimy forest, along with other exclusion zones along the Western Front and elsewhere, materially and ecologically ‘remember’ armed conflict (see Leonard Reference Leonard2024).
Edge of the zone rouge (left) fenced off from the rest of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial site in northern France (figure by author).
Project insights
Involuntary heritage, red zones and the politics of exclusion
Work on the case studies has led to key theoretical interventions, including the development of the concept of ‘involuntary heritage’—the tangible and intangible traces of violence, such as war debris, industrial pollution and exclusionary conservation practices, imposed on landscapes and communities without their consent (Breithoff Reference Breithoff2025). These residues often produce zones of exclusion or red zones—areas rendered inaccessible due to toxicity, militarisation or state-imposed restrictions. While frequently framed as sites of ecological recovery or memorialisation, such zones also perform another function: they demonstrate how heritage can serve both as a means of protection and as an instrument of exclusion that reproduces broader structural inequalities, underscores the entanglement of ecological and colonial violence (see Gómez-Barris Reference Gómez-Barris2017) and demands a fundamental rethinking of conflict archaeology.
Rethinking conflict archaeologies
EoV challenges dominant paradigms in conflict archaeology that prioritise individual experience and localised analysis, advocating instead for a planetary perspective that foregrounds the ecological and political entanglements of violence. The project argues that, while important, isolated case studies risk obscuring the systemic forces—industrialised warfare, colonialism and environmental degradation—that drive global issues such as pollution. Just as Ghosh (Reference Ghosh2021) critiques literature, history and politics for focusing on individual moral narratives at the expense of recognising the unfolding climate emergency, EoV identifies a similar limitation in conflict archaeology, which often fails to situate individual sites within broader, long-term histories of human–environment relations and their global repercussions.
To make these interconnections visible, the project adopts Morton’s (Reference Morton2013) concept of the ‘hyperobject’: phenomena so vast in temporal and spatial scale—such as climate change or Styrofoam—that they defy individual comprehension. Armed conflict, EoV proposes, is itself a hyperobject composed of interwoven processes: weapons production, energy extraction, environmental degradation and sociopolitical entanglements. Though conflict is experienced in specific local contexts (e.g. battlefields, ruins, toxic residues), its effects are temporally deep (lasting across generations) and spatially diffuse (crossing national boundaries) (Breithoff Reference Breithoff2020, Reference Breithoff2025). By approaching conflict as a hyperobject, EoV reframes archaeological practice to engage with the dispersed, multiscalar nature of violence in the Anthropocene.
Building on Harrison’s (Reference Harrison2011) critique of archaeology’s historical focus on a buried and distant past that has no bearing on the present, EoV also emphasises the recursive, layered relationships between past, present and future and the current material entanglements shaped by long-term processes. The project thus aligns with other contemporary archaeologies that emphasise non-linear temporalities and understand archaeology as an inherently present-oriented practice (e.g. Olivier Reference Olivier2004; Harrison & Breithoff Reference Harrison and Breithoff2017; González-Ruibal Reference González-Ruibal2024) concerned with shaping heritage futures (Harrison et al. Reference Harrison2020). Archaeology must thus grapple with how past violence is mobilised, negotiated and contested in the now: the residues of armed conflict are not static remnants of the past but active forces shaping ecological and social futures.
This perspective transforms archaeology into a temporal ethics—a means of tracing how violence endures and morphs across time and therefore resists closure or finality. In rejecting the notion of (post)conflict as a definitive rupture, EoV underscores that violence does not simply end with regime changes or military withdrawal. Instead, it is embedded in landscapes, infrastructures and ecologies, and surfaces through contamination, exclusion and environmental degradation.
(Post)conflict as possibility
Crucially, EoV resists framing human and more-than-human actors as passive victims of involuntary heritage. Instead, it emphasises their agency in reconstituting life amidst devastation. (Post)conflict sites are not merely ruins of the past but resilient spaces of adaptation and emergent possibility (Khayyat Reference Khayyat2023). This resilience manifests not only in the material persistence of the archaeological record—in metals, UXO and chemical residues—but also in human endurance and ecological regeneration amidst the often-unwanted traces of violence. In light of this, the project advocates for forms of stewardship that neither arrest decay nor erase toxic pasts. Instead, it asks how human and more-than-human actors might live with and respond to the enduring, often harmful material legacies of conflict that shape landscapes and communities across time and through generations.
Conclusion
EoV demonstrates that contemporary archaeology and heritage studies must evolve to engage with the multispecies, long-term and planetary dimensions of violence. The project compels a rethinking of conflict archaeology and heritage not as sites of only closure or commemoration, but as spaces where environmental injustice, colonial histories and social inequalities are physically entangled. EoV advocates for a politics of recognition and care—one that refuses erasure and embraces the complex (im)materialities of ongoing harm. By reconceiving conflict heritage as active, entangled and unresolved, the project not only expands the scope of archaeological inquiry but also positions heritage as a critical terrain for confronting the overlapping crises of violence and socioenvironmental (in)justice.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my project partners and collaborators, without whom this research would not be possible. I also thank Matthew Leonard (Postdoctoral Researcher, Birkbeck, University of London) and Layla Renshaw (Co-I, Kingston University) for their insightful contributions to the France case study.
Funding statement
This work was supported by a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship Renewal – Ecologies of Violence: Heritage and Conflict in More-Than-Human Worlds (MR/X014991/1).
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