Atmospherics of War A Response

This brief response to Neel Ahuja’s “Animal Death as National Debility” focuses on his analysis of the intersections of speciesism, racism, and ableism in Syrian war narratives. Ahuja insightfully untangles a media-driven, over-determined portrayal of the Syrian uprisings that began in 2011, as well as the subsequent war that was framed as one of the world’s first “climate wars.” The appropriation of war terminology in the framing of “climate wars” is a liberalization of the violence of the Syrian uprisings and the many conduits of its brutal repression, a ventriloquizing of atmospherics of violence on which some types of causal trajectories surface or sublimate others.