Building from Scrap

This book is about the flourishing scrap recycling industry, reconstruction, and state-making in Iraqi Kurdistan within the wider conditions of the war economy, ruination, and state disintegration in Iraq. This book is about the flourishing scrap recycling industry, reconstruction, and state-making in Iraqi Kurdistan within the wider conditions of the war economy, ruination, and state disintegration in Iraq. Through a dialectical relationship between the afterlife and continuity of war over distinct but conjoined landscapes, it examines industrial work, labouring, and statelessness on a frontier territory near the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS). By documenting the advance of the global steelmaking industry, the spread and erosion of selective state sovereignty, and the struggle of dispossessed workers, the book sketches the economic geography of a contemporary market expansion over the northeast of Iraq in a relational and dynamic way. Umut Kuruüzüm is Assistant Professor of cultural economics at Istanbul Technical University, Turkey, who has been working on war economies, ruination, waste, recycling industries, and labor in thecontemporary Middle East. He is a London School of Economics (MSc, PhD) trained economic anthropologist, and he is currently leading a research project on plastic pollution, toxicity, and the inequalities of climate change on the north-eastern Mediterranean coast. This book is about the flourishing scrap recycling industry, reconstruction, and state-making in Iraqi Kurdistan within the wider conditions of the war economy, ruination, and state disintegration in Iraq. Through a dialectical relationship between the afterlife and continuity of war over distinct but conjoined landscapes, it examines industrial work, labouring, and statelessness on a frontier territory near the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS). By documenting the advance of the global steelmaking industry, the spread and erosion of selective state sovereignty, and the struggle of dispossessed workers, the book sketches the economic geography of a contemporary market expansion over the northeast of Iraq in a relational and dynamic way.