School of History, UCC
Dr Angus Mitchell, independent historian
Thursday 19 January 2023, 16:00 (4 PM), Teams
The paper will be delivered through MS Teams. Please, contact Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel, School of History, UCC, to obtain a Teams link or use the link below: j.aandewiel@ucc.ie
Paper When the Soviet Union retreated from Afghanistan in 1989 after a decade of military occupation, the UN’s planned resettlement of 5 million refugees living on the borders of Pakistan and Iran was severely stalled by the scale of the landmine problem. Anti-personnel mines and ERW (Explosive Remnants of War) littered the farmland, roadways, and mountain paths of Afghanistan. Thereby the Sisyphean task of clearing the fields of these hidden killers began. Over the last thirty years, Humanitarian Mine Action has expanded to become an integral dimension of both the global aid sector and is critical to the work of post-conflict reconstruction. However, our knowledge of Mine Action is hindered by the lack of an accessible archive to shape understanding and a hesitancy to scrutinise the emergence of the interdependencies between development, security and what can be identified as the military-humanitarian complex. This paper will look at the beginnings of Mine Action in Afghanistan and ask how humanitarian aid changed Afghanistan and how Afghanistan changed humanitarian aid? Dr Angus Mitchell is an independent historian based in Ireland. He has recently published articles in Irish Historical Studies, The Journal of Victorian Studies, Women’s History Review, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Presently, he is preparing to publish an article on the early years of Mine Action in Afghanistan.