Focaal

This introduction explores global warfare through accumulation, extraction, and historical conjuncture, revealing its deep ties to neoliberal economics. Recent conflicts, including Russia's invasion of Ukraine and wars in the Middle East, are not merely by-products of political strife but key mechanisms of extraction, wealth redistribution, dispossession, and state restructuring. Articles in this theme section analyze war's role in shaping economies in regions such as Iraq, Ukraine, and Bosnia revealing how financialized humanitarianism, military outsourcing, and informal war economies create new regimes of value. Using a conjunctural approach, the introduction highlights how warfare reshapes state power, global capital, and social relations. It illustrates war as both a destructive force and a structured system for accumulation and transformation, demonstrating its role in economic and political reconfiguration.

Since the mid-2000s, the steel recycling industry in Iraqi Kurdistan has rapidly expanded within the broader context of material destruction, state fragmentation, and the persistence of a war economy in Iraq. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a steel mill southwest of Erbil—located along the frontlines of the ISIS occupation between 2014 and 2016—this article traces the material and social afterlife of war scrap as it moves from zones of ruination to spaces of reconstruction. It argues that industrial value creation and accumulation are embedded in extra-economic and trans-spatial configurations. Within this, one region—marked by destruction and statelessness—supplies cheap, unregulated scrap, while the other—characterized by state-building and industrialization—provides the security necessary for accumulation.

This article ethnographically explores the widespread practices of guarantorship in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in order to investigate the persisting practices and rhetoric of mutual, private help that support value extraction in postwar financialization. Approaching warfare as an accelerating mechanism for neoliberal restructuring in the country, it addresses the structural transformations by which wartime dependence on transnational humanitarianism has been replaced by postwar dependance on loans provided by foreign multinational banks. In this framework, “financialized vernacular humanitarianism” is interpreted as an essential strategy that enables banks to access a vast postwar subprime market. Furthermore, this strategy reproduces a hierarchical form of governance and situated extraction through which finance seeks to profit from global warring and other social emergencies caused by crises of contemporary capitalism.

This article examines the intertwining of war economies in eastern Turkey across different historical periods. It explores the connection between the Turkish state's war on the Kurdish freedom movement and the practice of hunting for “Armenian” treasures, highlighting war's role in creating new accumulation opportunities. The article looks at forms of intimacy that emerge between state representatives and local Kurds and analyzes them as sites of condensation of the region's history of sovereign violence and resulting social relations. Considered a temporal hinge, this intimacy returns us to World War I's war economy, particularly the dispossession of Armenians. By examining the intersection of treasure hunting and war economies, the article investigates the broader history of citizenship and governance of difference during the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish nation-state.

This article examines the relationship between war-making and state-making in post-invasion Ukraine drawing on research among Ukrainian forced migrants in Romania and with Ukrainian military crowdfunding organizations. We argue that Ukraine is undergoing a process of dependent state formation. In the context of the war, the Ukrainian state has significantly expanded its military and political power while remaining economically dependent on foreign aid. The need to generate revenues for the war has pushed the state to become more extractive, in turn undermining its legitimacy and ideological power vis-à-vis its citizens domestically and abroad. In this way, even over a relatively short period of time, the war has become a site of institutional transformations in Ukraine.

This article analyzes the interplay between religion and urban transformations by focusing on the Moroccan Gnawa, a spiritual network of working-class musicians and ritual operators based in the old centers (the medinas) of most Moroccan cities, and on the gentrification in the center of Casablanca, Morocco's economic capital. Displacement and gentrification disrupt the relation with urban spaces, which is a crucial, though understudied, feature of the Gnawa brotherhood, and thus entails deep changes to their economic, social, and ritual life. Urban transformations in Casablanca mobilize religious discourses and symbols, while restricting access to spaces that allow vernacular ritual practice. Religion, however, may also provide a language to react, at least symbolically, to urban transformations.

Scholars have recognized that it is not simply Ukraine's victory over Russia but also Ukraine's ability to secure peace that is a necessary precondition for successful (postwar) recovery. While Ukraine claims to fight an anti-imperial war against Russia, Ukraine's ability to secure peace depends on the course of its decolonization practices in the realm of cultural heritage and national identity. This article discusses popular articulations of national self-identification in Ukraine prior to and at the time of the Russian war (2014–). It traces key issues that have been at stake on Ukraine's “cultural front”—the domain of cultural production and debates about colonization of Ukrainian culture—suggesting that a novel, inclusive style of nationalism is pertinent to secure peace in Ukraine.

Departing from the temptation of treating the concept of hegemony as a singular, essentialized regime, or as a term synonymous with domination, the article invites attention to its dynamic and multilayered meaning. A more nuanced treatment of the concept brings forward its plural and contested connotations. In the analysis presented here I foreground the benefits of using the concept in processual terms, as well as the internal differentiation between Gramscian-inspired appr oaches. I consider the work of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, as representative of a distinctively British reading of Gramsci. To the degree that a narrow and singularized use of hegemony can lead to flat and unexciting conceptualization of power, Gramscian-inspired uses capture the fluidity, complexity, and materiality of power articulations and our proximity to them.