The Department of Mobility and Migration at the Institute of Ethnology CAS invites you to the upcoming Morning Brew Talk “The Fire Will Never Cease: Defiant Ecologies in South Lebanon ” by Munira Khayyat, a writer and anthropologist whose work focuses on life in war, intimate genealogies of empire, and theory from the South.

 

The lecture will take place on Tuesday 29.9.2026, 9:30–11:30 (CET) in the conference room (5th floor) of the Institute of Ethnology CAS, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1. To attend online via MS Teams, please use this link.

 

Abstract: Scorched earth, blackened skies, poisoned waters and fires everywhere. This talk shares urgent truths from the grounds of resistant being amidst ceaseless wars in South Lebanon. Here, rooted communities defiantly confront seasonal military assaults by imperial and settler-colonial war-machines as the intentional destruction of life. War is lived across decades as repeated environmental devastation upon the land, its dwellers and keepers, who together confront methodical annihilation and enduring occupation through defiant acts of return and repair. Speaking from the shattered grounds of the present amidst the immediacy of ongoing wars and occupation and so-called ceasefires, this talk brings to light the multi-species ecologies that resist and survive endless seasons of scorched-earth devastation in South Lebanon.

 

Bio: Munira Khayyat is a writer and anthropologist whose work focuses on life in war, intimate genealogies of empire, and theory from the South.. Her first book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (University of California Press, 2022), draws on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon's southern border to explore how war shapes not only death and destruction but also the everyday environment of living. She is now writing a second book, Heart of Black Gold, which uses her maternal grandfather's personal archive—he was among ARAMCO's first Arabian employees—to examine how oil's extractive infrastructures have shaped lived environments in Saudi Arabia.

 

The poster in PDF format is available for download HERE.