Afghanistan: A Lexicon uses the form of a lexicon to present a nonlinear narrative of twentieth-century Afghan history as a recursive loop of modernization attempts, revolts, collapses, and recoveries.The lexicon covers seventy-one terms, most illustrated by archival and original images, including: vocabulary unique to Afghan politics, like bi-tarafi, jirga, and nizamnamah; terms that have specific meanings or resonances in the Afghan context, like “infidel,” “martyr,” and spetsnaz; key players and places, from Bacha-i-Saqqao to Hizb-i-Islami and from the Bala Hissar to the Microrayan; and special entries on recurrent events and themes that form the weft and warp of the century, ...

Napoléon was the first conqueror to “legalize” looting by forcing the vanquished to sign contracts surrendering historic art objects. The recent selling off and dispersal of the collection of Iraq Museum, was presented as the simple work of market forces, but it continues and extends Napoleonic forms of looting.

What is the impact of demolition on those who witness it not through the media but in situ? Does living through the destruction of one’s built environment produce a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder? Do buildings deserve the same protections as people? How might we develop strategies to prevent further damage and to treat already-damaged people and buildings?

It’s unclear how many people still alive today can remember feeling the strange, warm rains that fell over the riverside city of Pripyat on the Ukraine-Belarus border in late April 1986. Pripyat was built in 1970 to serve the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, dedicated to harnessing the mirnyy atom (“peaceful atom”) for the Soviet Union. For the past thirty-six years, Pripyat and a surrounding exclusion zone of inconsistent bounds bridging swaths of today’s Ukraine, Belarus, and a bit of Russia have been off limits to most human beings. In this issue of e-flux journal, Svitlana Matviyenko disagrees with Paul ...

This discussion with local architect Miloš Kosec about three (hi)stories of ruins in WWII Slovenia uses the structure of his Master’s thesis research on this topic. After an introduction about the sometimes problematic fascination one might develop for ruins, we begin our specific conversation with the example of the ruins of entire ethnic German areas in southern Slovenia emptied of their inhabitants after they were encouraged to move back to Germany by the Reich administration. The second example is found in the numerous medieval castles burnt by the partisans in their fight against the Axis in what appear to Miloš ...

What happens when we surf the Internet from a country that exerts strong censorship? The aims of an Internet researcher might be considerably influenced by the territorialisation of their Internet surfing. The starting point in this non-academic paper is the author’s personal research on Hito Steyerl’s work. From that, he has come to provide a partial perspective of communication in Turkey’s contemporary politics. This Bulletin is focused on the accessibility of the information about Kurdish issues, and on how a new digital passport allows one to attain knowledge otherwise hidden.

In this conversation, Derek Gregory shares with us a few aspects of his simultaneously broad and precise knowledge of the ways war function. We examine together the current so-called “war on terror” in which the United States and their allies have engaged since 2001. Derek distinguishes three spaces that need to be produced in order for war to operate physically and apparently legitimately. We first consider a drone as an object crystalizing both the paradigm of contemporary war, but also the vessel of all wrongly posed questions that perpetuate the status quo. All disciplines are mobilized for war: geography, technology, architecture, ...

Nocturnal Fabulations is an essay in intercessing. This is not a book that is simply ‘about’ Apichatpong Weerasethakul, though it does engage his work in detail. It is a book that deeply questions what else might be at stake in setting up the conditions for collaboration across two genres: cinema and writing. This collective project is animated by a shared curiosity in the pragmatics of fabulation and its speculative gesture of bringing forth a people to come. In an encounter with Apichatpong’s cinematic dreamscape, the concepts of ecology, vitality and opacity emerge to articulate an ethos of fabulation that deframes experience, recomposes ...

300,000 U.S. troops have now served multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands, including many in IVAW, are being sent back to war despite their trauma from previous deployments, including Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), and Military Sexual Trauma (MST). The reality is, military commanders are pushing service members far past human limits in order to continue the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Service members are not being screened systematically for mental trauma. In combat, there’s a shortage of behavioral health personnel, and soldiers are given psychotropic medications instead of comprehensive therapy. Commanders often ...

In early May, Gastón Gordillo received me at the University of British Columbia, which allowed us to talk about his upcoming book, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction, as well as the essay “Nazi Architecture as Affective Weapon” written for The Funambulist Papers series. We talk about the politics of ruins from Albert Speer’s plans for Third Reich Berlin that was meant to generate glorious ruins to the different types of ruins that exist at the foot of the Andes in North Argentina. There, in contrast to the attitude by local authorities, local people do not view ruins as historic relics that should ...

Provisional Readymades takes up the temporal limits of the exhibition format in order to temporarily introduce goods from Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus into the sovereign Republic of Cyprus. Following the procedures enumerated in European Council Regulation No. 866/2004, which establishes special rules for those areas of Cyprus “temporarily outside the area of freedom, justice and security,” the goods were accompanied by an exhibition catalogue “providing reasonable evidence” of their intended exhibition. After their mandatory exhibition period at the NeMe Arts Centre in Limassol (Republic of Cyprus), the objects were placed on long-term loan to S.N.K. Venus Home Developers Ltd (liquidated 2011) in Pyla, ...