From rubble to rebuilding

Since the mid-2000s, the steel recycling industry in Iraqi Kurdistan has rapidly expanded within the broader context of material destruction, state fragmentation, and the persistence of a war economy in Iraq. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a steel mill southwest of Erbil—located along the frontlines of the ISIS occupation between 2014 and 2016—this article traces the material and social afterlife of war scrap as it moves from zones of ruination to spaces of reconstruction. It argues that industrial value creation and accumulation are embedded in extra-economic and trans-spatial configurations. Within this, one region—marked by destruction and statelessness—supplies cheap, unregulated scrap, while the other—characterized by state-building and industrialization—provides the security necessary for accumulation.