About

Kali Rubaii is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University. Her research focuses on displacement, war-impacted ecologies, and environmental health justice. Through forensic ethnography, Dr. Rubaii's work bears witness to the violent material impact of extractive industry and war on people's lives. She is currently leading two interdisciplinary projects: one involves working with a team of doctors, epidemiologists, and environmental activists to document the links between birth anomalies and military environmental damage in Fallujah, Iraq; the other investigates concrete production in post-invasion Iraq as it enforces global regimes of class and citizenship.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Criminology
• Public relations
• Engineering
• Anthropology
• Law
• History
• Media studies
• Ancient history

Selected publications

• Bone uranium and lead concentrations in adults from Fallujah, Iraq

  Environmental Pollution · 2025-08-07 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Deferral and dispersal: The military violence of post-war clean-up

  Human Organization · 2025-01-02 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• When “conflict free” minerals go to war

  Political Geography · 2025-09-23 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The article develops a simple but important argument: “conflict free” minerals are essential to the waging of contemporary war. This argument is substantiated over three main sections. First, we provide historical background to the idea of “conflict minerals” to show how they are narrowly associated with the violence of extraction and with consumer products (phones, electric vehicles, etc) in way that forecloses their use in weapons manufacturing and war further along the supply chain. Second, we draw from fieldwork in Rwanda and secondary sources to explicate the ways that minerals attain “conflict free” certification despite documented links with conflict in central Africa. Transparency in supply chains, we show, is carefully angled: issues of provenance (i.e., the movement of minerals to and in Rwanda) are obscured yet meticulous systems are in place to enable and trace the movement of minerals from Rwanda. In the third section, we focus on the supply of tin and tantalum from Rwanda to weapons suppliers and outline the use of those minerals in contemporary military hardware. In conclusion we sketch an agenda for future research on “conflict free” minerals that go to war.

  PublisherDOI

• Spatial Distribution of Heavy Metal Contamination in Soils of Fallujah, Iraq

  Exposure and Health · 2024-05-11 · 6 citations

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  PublisherDOI

• Late modern war and the <i>geos</i> : The ecological ‘beforemaths’ of advanced military technologies

  Security Dialogue · 2024-10-18 · 18 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This article develops the idea that late modern war’s relationship with the geos (the ground and the life it sustains) is doubly destructive. While part of this is recognized in a recent focus on slow violence and ecological aftermaths, there is little consideration of the ‘beforemath’, or the sites of extraction that make advanced military technologies possible. Drawing attention to mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the article connects military technologies to arms manufacturers and their use of extracted minerals (e.g. cobalt, tantalum, copper, uranium). Shared patterns of environmental and public health effects across parts of Iraq, Gaza and the DRC indicate the doubly destructive nature of late modern war’s relationship with the geos: toxic materials threaten life after war as the deposits of bombardment and before war as mineral commodities at the beginning of arms supply chains. The article explicates how a perspective from the beforemath radically refigures the ways we think about war and spatiality, temporality, and the range of bodies affected in ways that promise a fuller understanding of the violence distributed by practices of late modern war.

  PublisherDOI

• This Is Why We Protect the Rivers, This Is How We Love the Rivers

  Critical Times · 2023-08-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The Tigris and Euphrates Rivers are the sacred world-makers and life-sustainers of Iraq. At the same time, war has transformed them into toxified vectors of disease, death, and neglect. The “river protectors” (some of them identifying as activists, others not) strive to protect and repair their river ecologies from unjust destruction, even as they work under the shadow of prophecy that predicts the irreparable demise of these waterways. This essay explores how people love doomed rivers and what it means to pursue environmental repair and justice in the face of massive, irreversible harm.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Troubling complicities

  Hau Journal of Ethnographic Theory · 2023-09-01 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This creative article seeks to trouble dominant modes of how anthropologists position themselves as moral subjects and grapple with their complicity with/in empire today: what we call “bearing witness” and “denunciation/confession.” In contrast to these models, we perform and theorize our own complicities by staying with the multiple social, relational, political, and epistemological entanglements that our fieldwork produces. Through a braided dialogue, we demonstrate the multiple responsibilities and relationalities that come with the positions we occupy as subjects, researchers, and narrators of empire. We define complicity as an active, transitive engagement with others as we are situated in multiple structures of power. Theorizing complicity helps us reveal what relations of knowledge and power we are responsible for making visible and how we can analytically respond to them. By pluralizing complicity, our aim is to stimulate much needed conversation on questions of anthropology’s relation to tentacles of empire.

  PublisherDOI

• “Concrete Soldiers”: T-walls and Coercive Landscaping in Iraq

  International Journal Middle East Studies · 2022 · 58 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Ancient history
  • Engineering

  Standing inside a t-wall factory in Erbil in the summer of 2021, I was struck by the fact that, nearly twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, these military walls were still in production. T-walls are six-ton steel-reinforced, blast-proof concrete wall segments named for their upside-down t-shape (Fig. 1). They were introduced to Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s. Derivative of the Berlin wall's design, they are recognizable to those who have witnessed the Israeli separation wall, which is composed of thousands of t-walls lined up.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 1 When States Need Refugees: Iraqi Kurdistan and the Security Alibi

  Berghahn Books · 2022-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The environmental risk factors of birth defects in Iraq

  ISEE Conference Abstracts · 2022-09-18

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  BACKGROUND AND AIM: Ever since the war started in 2003, Iraqi doctors have reported an increase in the birth of children with congenital anomalies. According to them, the rise in incidence has been attributed to war-related heavy metal pollution e.g. from depleted uranium and white phosphorus. As the war impeded quality research, the current post-conflict situation has allowed renewed space for quality research. The aim of the study is to assess to what extent exposure to environmental pollution might be associated with the incidence of congenital anomalies in Iraq. METHODS: We conducted a case-control study in Fallujah, a heavily bombarded city, comparing 50 parents of children with birth defects and 50 parents of children without birth defects. We used a questionnaire to comprehensively document environmental exposure and history of residence of each couple. Further, we complemented the interviews with biomonitoring through hair analysis of parents on heavy metals using ICP-MS. In addition, we took soil samples of the city of Fallujah using grid sampling and compared this to a control city in northern Iraq which has been less bombarded. We used Stata to statistically assess the differences in case and control groups regarding exposure and heavy metal concentrations, correcting for confounders like age and socio-economic status. RESULTS: Comprehensive data analysis will take place in the summer 2022. Our preliminary results already point to a striking discrepancy between the occupation of the fathers of children children with congenital anomalies and the fathers of the control group. The fathers of the birth defects are more often construction workers, working on houses often damaged or levelled by war. CONCLUSIONS: Having a child with a congenital anomaly in Iraq might be associated with paternal environmental exposure, possibly through epigenetic pathways. KEYWORDS: Congenital anomalies, Military pollution, Teratogenicity, Epigenetics, Exposome

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Saiba Varma

  1 shared

• Ian C. Lindsay

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  1 shared

• Aaron J. Specht

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  1 shared

• Mark Griffiths

  Newcastle University

  1 shared

• Jeffrie Quarsie

  Utrecht University

  1 shared

• Ellen M. Wells

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  1 shared