Wars have made the world we live in. From nation-states and bureaucracies to tax and pension systems, international law, and intergovernmental organisations, specific wars have shaped the modern institutions and orders that govern our lives. Central to this are war economies: the political, material, and moral arrangements through which states, rebels, movements, and corporations organise labour and resources for the exercise of political violence.
Amid the resurgence of war and genocide, it is crucial to understand how political economies are reorganised to provide for war. This talk focuses on the emerging global economies of drone warfare and how they both rely on and transform local social orders. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research with soldiers, activists, and entrepreneurs who run the global value chains of drone warfare in the Russo-Ukrainian war, anthropologist Taras Fedirko will examine how new war economies come into being, how they endure, and how they transform political and moral orders in their wake.
Taras Fedirko is a Senior Research Fellow at the IWM and lecturer (assistant professor) at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. He received his PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from Durham University and held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Cambridge and St Andrews. He is a political and economic anthropologist whose research explores how social movements organise to transform war economies; states; and capitalist labour and value regimes.
IWM Rector Misha Glenny will introduce the lecture and moderate the subsequent discussion.
