The Long-Term Health Consequences of Exposure to Burn Pits in Iraq: A conversation with Kali Rubaii

In August 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden signed an act expanding benefits and healthcare to U.S. veterans exposed to toxins in burn pits. But what about Iraqi exposure to burn pits? Kali Rubaii's research addresses their longterm diffuse exposure at all stages of their life, with effects that are varied and widespread. Rubaii has worked closely with Iraqi families since 2009, leading a team of doctors, epidemiologists and activists to conduct a case control study among families experiencing birth defects that may be linked to burn pits and bombings. In this interview, she speaks with Malihe Razazan about her work.

Courtesy of Voices of the Middle East & North Africa (VOMENA).
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Kali Rubaii earned her PhD in Anthropology from University of California, Santa Cruz and her BA in International Relations from University of California, Davis.

Specialization: displacement, ecologies of war, spatial politics, forensic ethnography, health justice, Middle East.

Kali Rubaii is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University, interested in sharpening resistance strategies that target the vulnerable nexus between coercive power and the physical world.

Her research explores the environmental impacts of less-than-lethal militarism, and how military projects (re)arrange political ecologies in the name of “letting live.” Her book project, Counter-resurgency, examines how farmers in Anbar, Iraq struggle to survive and recover from transnational counterinsurgency projects.

She is currently conducting fieldwork for two ethnographic projects: Taking toxicity as an analytic for material politics, she is working with a team of doctors, epidemiologists, and environmental activists to document the links between the epidemic of birth defects in Fallujah and military environmental damage. She is also researching the corporate-military enterprise of concrete production in post-invasion Iraq and how it enforces global regimes of class and citizenship.