Landmine Clearance, or the Promise of a Project without End
Journal: Social Anthropology
Year: 2024

Abstract It is said that for each year of armed conflict, a decade is needed to clean up the explosive remnants of war. What does it mean to imagine a project of such duration? In landmine removal, what is theoretically temporary work can start to look permanent. Tracking the efforts of a prominent humanitarian de-mining organisation, the British–American HALO Trust, in then-government-controlled eastern Ukraine, I show how clearance both follows project logic as well as upends two key assumptio