Landmine Clearance, or the Promise of a Project without End

in Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
Author:
Deborah A. Jones Researcher, Max Planck Institute, Germany jones@eth.mpg.de

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Abstract

It is said that for each year of armed conflict, a decade is needed to clean up the explosive remnants of war. What does it mean to imagine a project of such duration? In landmine removal, what is theoretically temporary work can start to look permanent. Tracking the efforts of a prominent humanitarian de-mining organisation, the British–American HALO Trust, in then-government-controlled eastern Ukraine, I show how clearance both follows project logic as well as upends two key assumptions of the project form: that projects have ends and that they have results. I demonstrate ethnographically how Ukrainians working for HALO approached de-mining as a project of unclear duration, finding both horror and promise in the protracted timeline. Nevertheless, I conclude that the idea of a project without end is a fallacy because the supportive structures that enable the project may evaporate at any moment.

Résumé

On dit que pour chaque année de conflit armé, il faut une décennie pour nettoyer les vestiges explosifs de la guerre. Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire d'imaginer un projet de telle durée ? Pendant le déminage d'un champ de bataille, ce qui est envisagé théoriquement comme un travail temporaire peut, petit à petit, ressembler à un travail permanent. Cet article examine les efforts d'une association humanitaire qui joue un rôle de premier plan dans le déminage : le britannique-américain Trust HALO. L'association humanitaire a poursuit son activité dans l'Ukraine de l'est, autrefois sous le contrôle du gouvernement ukrainien. Nous expliquons comment le déminage adhère à la logique du projet et, en même temps, renverse deux suppositions principales de la forme de projet : l'idée que les projets ont conclusions et l'idée que les projets ont des résultats. En s'appuyant sur l'ethnographie, nous montrons comment les Ukrainiens qui travaillent pour le trust HALO ont abordé le déminage comme un projet de duration indéterminée. Les travailleurs se sont ressentis à la fois de l'horreur et de l'espoir en face d'un calendrier de longue durée. Néanmoins, nous concluons que l'idée d'un projet sans fin est fallacieuse parce que les structures de soutènement qui permettent l'avancement du projet pourraient disparaître à tout moment.

‘The thing is, there's no climax.’ The British field officer kicked the parking lot gravel so that dusty plumes circled upward. He sputtered his lips, mimicking an explosion. ‘I mean there's no boom. We don't have a detonation licence in Ukraine.’ A moment passed as we pondered the irony of the British–American HALO Trust,1 the world's largest (humanitarian) landmine clearance organisation, not being able to destroy the deadly explosives it specialises in eliminating.

‘What happens to the mines?’ I asked. I pictured the squat, grey-green anti-tank mines I had seen in a display case of recovered items at HALO's Kramatorsk office. The Soviet-produced TM-62s resembled tin cans, but broader, heavier, deadlier. Some weeks earlier, in a village near what was then the de facto border between Kyiv and separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine, one of the frying-pan-sized devices had blasted apart a family car, and an entire family.

The officer shrugged. ‘Our people find the mines. We coordinate with State Emergency Services to have them destroyed. But it's on the government's timeline, and there's a lot of paperwork.’

It was late summer 2018 and Ukraine was already one of the most mined countries in the world. Russia's full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022 brought the war in Ukraine to global attention. However, for Ukrainians, the war began in 2014, in the aftermath of the pro-western Maidan Revolution (now known formally in Ukraine as the Revolution of Dignity), with Russia's annexation of Crimea and the declaration of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics by Russian-backed separatists. By 2018, fighting had killed over 13,000 people, a third of them civilians, and left upward of 1.5 million displaced.2 A fragile ceasefire (Minsk II, signed 2015) divided the region into Kyiv- and separatist-controlled parts. Fighting still broke out regularly along the ‘line of contact’, sending rockets far into ‘the grey zone’. But compared to how things had been, compared to how things would be, life was relatively calm, and so in 2015, the Ukrainian government, in cooperation with HALO and other relief organisations, cautiously began to clear the unexploded shells, tripwires and more controversially, anti-tank mines from the first stages of fighting. This ethnography is about that moment, perhaps a naïve one, when residents of Ukrainian Donbas were planning for a future – one that included work for years to come.

The officer and I turned to face the parking lot, where eleven-man teams of de-miners were assembling gear for their next ten-day rotation. Within the hour, I would join a caravan taking a slow and circuitous route around the self-declared Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics to a village called Krasna Talivka located at the Ukrainian–Russian border. There, the de-miners – locals as well as the travellers departing Kramatorsk – would engage in the tedious work of conducting a ‘technical survey’ of fields, roadsides and forests suspected of contamination with unexploded ordnance (UXO). Those working in agricultural fields and grasslands would spend hours on their hands and knees, first using a fibre glass ‘wand’ to check for tripwires and then manually cutting back vegetation, twenty centimetres at a time, before using a metal detector to sweep two-by-two metre quadrants for explosives, including, but not limited to, the TM-62M anti-tank mines. Those working in a timber forest wielded their wands to locate OZM-72s, a Soviet-produced bounding fragmentation mine, which can ‘jump’ up and spray metal fragments at waist height in a thirty-metre radius. Much of this work was impossible in the snowy steppe winters, protracting the process. Explosives clearance is tremendously time-consuming, even before you get to the paperwork.

The United Nations Mine Action Service estimates that for every year of armed conflict, it takes a decade to remove explosive remnants of war. In autumn 2018, my Ukrainian interlocutors frequently cited this statistic. They mentioned it in conversations about the painstaking nature of clearance work, which was progressing well in northern Stanytsia Luhanska region, where we were, but had hardly begun to the south, where life along the de facto border with the separatist territories amounted to humanitarian crisis (Bulakh 2018; Milakovsky 2018; Uehling 2023). They used it to highlight the lasting effects of war on the environment: landmines are but one type of military waste that contaminates soil, forests and waterways, rendering life uncertain long after conflicts have been frozen or resolved (Henig 2019; Kim 2016; Pardo Pedraza 2020; Zani 2019). But my interlocutors also cited the one-year, one-decade prognosis in discussions about economic opportunity and job stability. Counterintuitively, in rural eastern Ukraine, the war and recovery therefrom offered steady employment and opportunities for advancement not seen since the 1990s.

Here, I analyse post-conflict explosives clearance as a project: ‘a goal-driven approach to planning, resource allocation, and task coordination’ that grounds human agency, encourages future-thinking and normalises the expectation that one can act on the world within set timeframes (Graan and Rommel this issue). Projects come in different sizes (e.g. clearing all the UXO in a specified minefield, in a village, in all of Ukraine), but typically they are temporary organisations with anticipated starts, finishes and intermediate phases; set budgets; expected deliverables; and a goal that is not routine.

The explosives clearance efforts discussed here operate according to project logic: de-miners work in teams, on timed schedules and cycles, within a clear hierarchy and in accordance with a strict set of rules and protocols to realise specific goals. Instead of conducting clearance only once an explosive has been found (a ‘reactive’ approach), HALO takes a ‘systematic approach’, working to identify ‘polygons’ of land suspected of mine contamination (non-technical survey), inspect them (technical survey), organise detonations and conduct quality control so that the land can be returned to communities with the assurance it is mine-free (Hewitt and Shenhav 2021; Robinson and O'Keeffe 2019).

Of course, things do not always go according to plan. In the broader world of explosives clearance (‘de-mining’ being shorthand for the disposal of more than landmines), as in the broader world of projects more generally, one regularly encounters efforts delayed, incomplete, struggling to lasso their participants’ divergent schedules and commitments, or beleaguered with objectives that appease sponsors but do not reflect local concerns. Sometimes de-mining projects are abandoned when funds dry up, or armed conflict resumes. In short, de-mining exhibits many of the same features – and vulnerabilities – of other projects, particularly those in which the tension between ‘vision’ and ‘logistics’ is particularly pronounced (Graan 2022).

However, beyond the bumps, hiccups and false starts that are typical of projects, I argue that explosives clearance is an endeavour of such magnitude and temporal horizon that it can cause the logic of what Andrew Graan and Carl Rommel call ‘the project form’ to break down. Most notably, the notion that a project has a terminus is thrown into question. The end-goal or ‘deliverable’ of a de-mining project initially seems obvious: rid the area of explosives. There are certainly successfully completed de-mining projects: for example, Mozambique cleared all 171,000+ of its known landmines following two decades of meticulous work (much of it overseen by HALO); the once highly militarised interior border that divided East and West Germany is now a nature preserve. However, as the opening vignette suggests, the final removal of a landmine may be beyond a clearance operator's control. Those who locate explosives may never witness their detonation, destruction or disposal. In addition, the areas most contaminated by mines may not be accessible to de-miners, or the clearance deemed so complicated that land is simply marked as mined and abandoned. Left untriggered, landmines and other UXO can remain active for a century, easily outliving their precipitating conflicts. Further, explosives don't necessarily stay where first dropped or lain, but can be shifted, swept or even scurried away by erosion, floods or small animals. Such ‘rogue infrastructure’ (Kim 2016) prolongs the work of the parties that planted them and renders the landscape uncertain. This is where the one-year of war, one-decade of clean-up prognosis comes from. In Ukraine, where hostilities have devastated communities from the Sea of Azov to suburbs of Kyiv, clearance efforts could continue for generations.

In this article, I show how my Ukrainian interlocutors – HALO employees as well as villagers in a landmine-affected community – approached de-mining as a project of unclear duration, a timescale both horrible and promising. While scholarship on projects, particularly those in post-conflict zones (on the ‘projectariat’, see Baker 2014), often emphasise the precarity the inherently temporary project form creates, I argue that in explosives clearance, temporary work can begin to look more and more permanent – or at least always accessible. At the same time, I caution that the idea of a project without end is a fallacy, because the supportive structures that enable the project can disappear at any time. Ultimately, I suggest that explosives clearance both exemplifies and reveals the limits of the project form. Further, because projects naturalise and normalise the ability to act on the world in timebound fashion (Graan and Rommel this issue), explosives clearance both exemplifies human aspirations for solving some of the world's most pressing problems, as well as reveals the limits of such idealism.

In the next section, I discuss the impact economic transition, border closures and war had on one landmine-affected village, Krasna Talivka. Then, I turn to the work of de-mining, explaining how its organisation and objectives parallel other development and reconstruction projects, but its long timeline and uncertain outcomes trouble the project form. I introduce two de-miners who found promise in working for HALO, but whose personal objectives exceeded or even contradicted those of the project and organisation. Finally, reflecting on the revolving door between HALO and the Ukrainian military, I consider how processes of militarisation yield unending projects of demilitarisation (Reno 2020). I conclude with an update and prognosis for Ukraine's clearance efforts following Russia's full-scale invasion.

The Ukrainian–Russian Border: From Crossroads to Hinterland

The journey from Kramatorsk to Krasna Talivka took six hours, including three stops: one for fuel, one for water, and one for rest and snacks. The first stop was necessary because the journey was long and indirect. The once-quickest route, the highway via the city of Luhansk, was blocked by numerous checkpoints and, besides, HALO was not permitted to enter the separatist territories. The most direct route was similarly southern, near the ‘line of contact’ established by the 2015 Minsk Protocol. However, the ceasefire agreement was regularly violated, and the area ridden with obstacles, including explosive remnants from the slow-simmering war in Donbas (2014–2022). Thus, we were routed north, through Sievierodonetsk. The second stop, at a public spring, was essential because there was no potable water at the worksite, and the team would grow thirsty under the hot sun. The third stop was at a bus station and market in Starobilsk, a dusty regional centre that offered the last opportunity to reliably purchase one's preferred snacks, toiletries or cigarettes before reaching Krasna Talivka, a small village (approximately a thousand inhabitants) that had once stood at the crossroads of the Soviet Union, but now was surrounded by landmines.3

‘We're an appendix’, a local shopkeeper told me. ‘No one needs us.’ But Krasna Talivka wasn't always an appendix. In the Soviet era, it was home to a large state farm that produced garden seeds. Agronomists and labourers came from as far away as Central Asia to develop fruit and vegetable cultivars that were planted across the USSR. The village bisects a finger of land surrounded by Russia, but in the Soviet era the border was merely administrative, and even after Ukrainian independence, locals moved freely back and forth, both to visit friends and family and for economic purposes. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the dismantlement of state and collective farms yielded the rise of private farmers and a turn to export commodities (rapeseed, wheat, sunflower), which required expensive machinery but few labourers. Villagers who had grown up with the promise of steady employment and pensions on retirement found themselves without work, and Krasna Talivka quickly depopulated.

FIGURE 1.
FIGURE 1.

Map prepared by Evan Centanni and Djordje Djukic of Political Geography Now (https://www.polgeonow.com/2020/09/ukraine-war-2020-map.html), used here with permission. Control shown here was similar at time of fieldwork.

Citation: Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 32, 3; 10.3167/saas.2024.320303

However, for those who stayed, Ukrainian independence created other economic opportunity: some Krasna Talivkans became traders, buying toiletries, cosmetics, shoes, alcohol, phone cards, and so on in Russia and selling them at a profit in Ukraine, and vice versa. Then came the war. The borders to Russia closed, and the biggest market, Luhansk city, lay firmly in separatist territory. Krasna Talivka was transformed from crossroads to hinterland and, for the second time in a generation, faced economic collapse.

During the war in Donbas, Krasna Talivka remained under Kyiv's control. However, its strategic location, continuing separatist and saboteur activity, and confrontations between Ukrainian and Russian soldiers prompted the Ukrainian army to lay anti-tank mines at the village's north and south ends, where it met Russia, and along the highway south to the separatist territories, so that it would be difficult for an invading army to move heavy machinery. These locations, along with a mess of tripwires in a forest where, some locals claimed, an independent militia had camped, were the areas where HALO was conducting technical survey.

My village interlocutors (public administrators; teachers and librarians; farmers; shopkeepers; labourers; pensioners; de-miners – others may have held different opinions) did not necessarily approve of the anti-tank mines, but many thought fortifications of some sort had been necessary following a Russian attack that killed four Ukrainian border guards, or they hoped such devices might deter additional violence.4 They feared further invasion, even though the very notion that Russia would invade Ukraine still dumbfounded them. Most told me that they had not supported the pro-western Maidan Revolution because they felt – physically, linguistically, psychologically – nearer to Moscow and St Petersburg than to Brussels or Berlin. They felt betrayed, first when Russian military attacked, and even more so when friends and family in Russia refused to believe what had happened, or claimed the whole ordeal was a false flag operation orchestrated by Kyiv. Four years later, they remained bewildered. And exhausted. Further west, middle-class Ukrainians were enjoying visa-free travel to the EU, a growing economy propelled by a booming IT sector, a vibrant arts scene and the multiplier effects of redevelopment funds. In Krasna Talivka, people faced economic despair, estrangement from friends and family, the loss of public transport and limited access to coal or other heating sources. It often happened that when I asked villagers about the timber forest full of tripwires, or the roadways and agricultural fields lain with mines, they would reply, ‘that's terrible, of course, but did you know there is no marshrutka [public minibus]?’ or ‘do you understand the cost of a mashina drov [a carload of firewood]?’

We reached Krasna Talivka before sunset, but the air was dusky, thick, from a still smouldering wildfire. ‘That actually makes our job easier’, a HALO staffer said. The fire would burn back the overgrown fields and grasslands, making tripwires simpler to spot. The staffer escorted me to border guard headquarters so it would be known there was ‘a new face’ in town. While I undoubtedly stood out as a foreigner, I was far from the only newcomer in Krasna Talivka. Between the military, travelling de-miners (those not from Krasna Talivka or a neighbouring village who lived in HALO-provided housing) and displaced people, there were many new faces, and locals complained of being uncertain who was who. But Krasna Talivka was also more isolated than it had ever been in most residents’ lifetimes. Most of my village interlocutors thought the anti-tank mines at the border should be removed to prevent accidents and permit farming and local traffic, and because clearance work brought money into the community. Some money, anyway. These new faces, the shopkeeper lamented, they don't buy much.

‘De-mining is Not Meant to be Dangerous’: Explosives Clearance as a Development Project

In the early evening, after their shifts had ended, the travelling de-miners walked in groups to the village centre. Most were young men in their 20s and early 30s, typically, but not necessarily, from greater Donetsk or Luhansk oblasts. However, there were also older, or at least more weathered, faces than I had expected, as well as a small number of workers from beyond war-affected eastern Ukraine. At this hour, the de-miners were not required to wear their regulation work boots, pocket-covered trousers, knee pads, Kevlar vests or face shields, but many still donned bright blue t-shirts with the HALO insignia, or smart British military-style jumpers with shoulder patches. In any case, they were impossible to miss.

HALO's origins in the military were visible in workers’ uniforms and in their shiny white vans, which were kept remarkably clean despite the late summer dust. It was apparent in the organisation of teams, which was hierarchical, such that it was clear at every step who was responsible for making decisions. And it was evident in the rules. HALO, I quickly learned, had a lot of rules: No alcohol, not a drop, during the work cycles; the evening forays to the village centre were strictly for soda, not spirits. No breaking curfew. No arriving late and no leaving early. No deviating from established policies and procedures. Safety was paramount and HALO's record is excellent. Since its founding in 1988, the charity has cleared millions of explosives across four continents with a minimal number of accidents.

In the introduction, I juxtaposed ‘reactive’ and ‘systematic’ de-mining, arguing that HALO's proactive, phased approach to clearance differs markedly from the ad hoc response taken by emergency ‘bomb squads’. However, I also observed that the persistence of unexploded ordnance, as well as the complexity of locating and destroying it, throws into question the notion that a de-mining project has a clear end date. The absence of a clear terminus causes another cornerstone of project logic to come loose: what the results of the project should be. I suggest that in de-mining projects, and perhaps in many forms of humanitarian aid, benefits other than the stated primary objective (here, clearance) become the true deliverables.

Sociologist Monika Krause argues that humanitarian aid is fundamentally ‘a form of production’ with ‘one primary output, which is “the project”’ – a short-term endeavour with clearly defined goals and planned deliverables; start and stop dates, budgets, task lists, team roles, and so on (2014: 4, 25). The project, she writes, adds cohesiveness to otherwise disparate activities. De-mining offers as case in point: a clearance project involves a multitude of tasks, most of which take place long before any minesweeping occurs. Consider the ‘non-technical surveys’ HALO conducts to assess which spaces need to be cleared: fieldworkers interview witnesses to understand which areas are affected and how. Simultaneously, HALO leadership coordinates with the government and/or military to determine which spaces should be prioritised (in Krasna Talivka, it was clear from the start that the timber forest should be cleared of tripwires, but the military did not initially agree to remove the anti-tank mines at the border) and HALO geoinformation and explosives experts create maps and clearance plans. Then come the practicalities: because many of HALO's Ukrainian de-miners work outside their home communities, the charity must organise housing, food and transport for them. Finally, the teams are assembled, accounting for leadership, experience and worker compatibility.

What we see here is how project form organises a variety of tasks and temporalities under a single rubric. In the humanitarian sector, this is not only a means of management, but a way to make projects digestible for donors. Projects, Krause observes, are not only ‘outputs’ but also ‘commodities’ bought and sold in a competitive market for funding. While there are many for-profit explosives clearance operators, HALO and similar humanitarian de-mining organisations receive significant funding from state governments as well as foundations and individuals. To appeal to donors, HALO's website and social media accounts feature success stories: in Ukraine at the time of my research, these included grazing land returned to dairy farmers; displaced people who found community and careers in explosives clearance; and female de-miners rising through the ranks to become team leaders. There were also sombre posts, for example, about the difficulty of clearing vital waterways, and about mine risk education programmes in schools. While those who lay landmines may intend to target adults, the victims of UXO are disproportionately children.5

In reading fundraising materials, as well as other reports in which HALO quantifies its achievements (for example, in late 2021 Ukraine, the maintenance of 400–450 staff, about one-quarter women) or details challenges faced (such as the pervasion of tripwires and minimum metal mines, which are hard to detect, especially in the steppe's highly mineralised soil), one realises that certain information is missing. There are statistics on the scope of the problem and perhaps the pace of clearance, but estimates of how long it will take to complete the job are rarer or more vague than one might expect, especially given that HALO is a charity dependent on donors. With regards to Ukraine, this is in part because the country is an active conflict zone and HALO's work there is just beginning. Clearing rows of anti-tank mines is simple compared to what HALO might find at the site of a major battle. But it is notable that HALO does not tout its speed, but rather experience, expertise and quality control. Instead of promising to clear a certain number of hectares or bombs within a given timeframe, HALO offers physical safety and economic security, both for mine-affected communities as well as for the de-miners themselves.

‘De-mining is not meant to be dangerous’, a HALO representative told me when I first inquired about conducting fieldwork in Donbas. I was surprised, not only because I presumed the work risky, but because the ethnographic literature on landmine-affected communities at that time was primarily about people living in places where clearance has been limited. To survive such uncertain landscapes, inhabitants must develop new means of reading and navigating their surroundings, such as running through certain fields only when the land has frozen over and the triggers on the mines are unable to depress (Kim 2016, in the Korean Demilitarised Zone); learning to spot tripwires or read trees for signs of shrapnel (Henig 2019, in Bosnia); or teaching children not to pick up what looks like a pineapple but is actually the remains of a cluster bomb (Zani 2019, in Laos). By starting clearance in Ukraine alongside other redevelopment work, such as repairing war-damaged buildings and essential infrastructure, HALO hoped to avoid the longue durée situations that have plagued other parts of the world. Additionally, as a humanitarian clearance organisation, they aimed to provide employment opportunities to the war-affected.

While the first wave of anthropological work on landmine-affected communities focused on how people live amid UXO, a second wave attends to the lives and motivations of people labouring in explosives clearance (Coburn 2018; DeAngelo 2018; Pardo Pedraza 2020; Zani 2019). A central insight of this scholarship is that clearance projects are as much about poverty alleviation and civic reconciliation as they are about restoring access to land, and that these are qualities that donors care deeply about. For example, Darcie DeAngelo, working at the Cambodian–Thai border, the most densely mined stretch of land in the world, documents how the use of explosive detection rats – described as fuzzy, loveable and heroic by their handlers – facilitates both clearance work as well as bonds among de-miners who once found themselves on opposite sides of a conflict. These heart-warming benefits are communicated to donors, whose contributions enable the continuation of the de-mining efforts. Leah Zani (2019; personal communications) observes that mine action often becomes an exercise in preparing paperwork, such as securing signatures confirming completion of a mine risk education course. She warns that when UXO contamination becomes endemic, what and where is cleared is not only determined by need or likelihood of success but also by whether a community can demonstrate potential for economic development.

To summarise, the project form presupposes the ability to act on the world in a predictable and timebound manner, yet the scale of the problem of unexploded ordnance, the ‘indeterminacy’ of the landscape (Henig 2019) and the inability to guarantee results within a set timeframe throw the assumption that explosives clearance has clear ends, or a clear end, into question. HALO may be able to promise the clearance of a particular polygon, but not a country as a whole. As such, the indirect benefits of de-mining programmes sometimes become the real deliverables, substituting for the desired, but so often deferred, objective of full explosives clearance.

Having established that explosives clearance both exemplifies and disrupts the project form, I now ask: what temporal and social imaginaries does a project without end afford?

Gena and Dima: Finding Promise in a Project (Seemingly) Without End

‘Cutting grass with scissors’ was how de-mining work was once described to me, and the image has stuck in my head. Minefields are often overgrown with vegetation, so before one can use a metal detector (‘to swing it’, in ‘sweeps’) one first needs to trim the area. Using a lawnmower, much less a combine, is not an option, so in the absence of mechanised de-mining equipment, de-miners must cut back vegetation with long-handled garden shears. Thereafter, they sweep. They repeat this exercise, day in and day out, struggling to prevent their minds from wandering. De-mining, I was told, is drudgery, more boredom than glory. Yet some of my interlocutors saw great potential in this gradual, monotonous work. In this section, I introduce two de-miners, one local to the area and one traveller, who saw possibility in a project of uncertain duration.

The first time I met Gena, it was almost, but not quite, his break time. I had wandered up to a clutch of HALO vans parked just south of the Derkul River, where local farmers had lost their fields to an underground wall of anti-tank mines. Gena waved through the open window of his van as I approached. Then he held up a finger. ‘Shchas, just a minute.’ We both waited. Finally, a crackle from the radio, and Gena climbed out, lit a cigarette and said, ‘now we can talk’.

Even with no one around, Gena strictly adhered to HALO's rules. He explained that others from the area had trained to be de-miners but were dismissed after being caught with alcohol, showing up to work late or committing even smaller infractions. Gena was determined not to let that happen. He was approaching 50 and had grown up on a nearby collective farm. After privatisation, Gena became a trader, initially doing cross-border runs of toiletries and cleaning supplies and later shuttling fresh meats between the countryside and fresh markets in Luhansk city. After the war started, he lost access to his customers. When HALO opened a tiny field office near his home, he thought it a God-send.

Despite the circumstances that brought him to HALO, Gena did not consider de-mining a job of last resort, nor did he see the work as temporary. Rather, he explained, HALO offered the sort of employment rural people had lacked in recent decades: official, on-the-books work that could yield a pension. Citing the Mine Action estimate that for every year of armed conflict, it takes a decade to clean up UXO, he speculated that his work for HALO could take him to retirement. Gena listed the reasons why he thought de-mining was a good job: his pay, about 500 euro per month, was excellent by village standards, enough to cover his family's immediate needs as well as save for the future. The salary always arrived on time (this is not guaranteed in Ukraine, especially in the informal sector), and he was even paid during the coldest, snowiest months of the year when technical survey was impossible. Gena appreciated the opportunities for advancement (de-miner, driver, paramedic, assistant team leader, team leader, supervisor) and told me that those senior to him were people he respected. He believed he was doing something important for his country. He liked working outside. His only regret was that his days were so long.

The consensus among the de-miners I spoke to was that although it was hard to be a travelling de-miner, it was more difficult to be a local one. While a travelling de-miner might end the day with a stroll to the centre, locals went home to more work. As one traveller, Dima, put it, ‘imagine being in the field all day on your hands and knees, having to concentrate so that you don't screw up, and then you have to go deal with the pigs’. That was exactly the situation Gena was in. He and his wife still raised animals for meat and, like most villagers in the area, grew and preserved their own fruits and vegetables. Therefore, every evening and inter-cycle break, Gena returned to more chores and family responsibilities. He was grateful to be able to work as a driver. Sitting in the van was often boring, but easier on his back than crouching in the minefield, cutting grass with scissors.

If, on sweeping, the detector detects metal in the ground below, the de-miners follow a set procedure, digging down and then slowly scraping and brushing forwards until they expose the metal object, be it a mine, other hazard or simply trash. In Ukraine, if an explosive is found, the team can neither deactivate nor remove it; it can only flag the find and call it in to State Emergency Services. This lack of resolution was frustrating for some of my interlocutors, not only because, as the field officer put it, there was no boom, but also because one was left with no idea whether the mines found were in fact destroyed, or returned to the arsenal, disassembled for parts or jerry-rigged into an improvised explosive device. Although locals like Gena could keep track of what happened to a polygon, travellers like Dima were typically transferred to another site before ‘their’ mines were handled.

Dima claimed that he didn't mind moving around; travel was actually one of the reasons he had joined HALO. A single man in his late 20s, he found Krasna Talivka dull and was eager to return to the Mariupol area along the Sea of Azov. There, he told me, you could go to the beach after work, not just drink Zhivchik (apple-echinacea soda) outside a village store. In Mariupol, there were more people to talk to than just the other de-miners, many of whom he found provincial. Dima, you see, was from Moscow.

The travelling de-miners were a diverse group comprising manual labourers, former soldiers, displaced persons and university graduates attempting to climb the ranks of NGOs, but almost all were Ukrainian, if not by ethnicity, then by citizenship. Dima was born in Kramatorsk, but his family moved to Russia when he was small and took Russian citizenship. His parents supported the separatists, whereas Dima was a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin and supporter of Ukrainian sovereignty. After the war started, Dima returned to Kramatorsk and set about restoring his Ukrainian passport. He started working for HALO because they could hire a Russian citizen, and because he saw explosives clearance as a non-violent means of helping his homeland. Unfortunately, Dima learned from a cousin that his parents believed he was laying landmines, not removing them. To his parents, Dima explained, there was little difference between working for a western, Kyiv-cooperating organisation and joining the Ukrainian military.

‘I'm thinking about Sri Lanka’, Dima wrote me late in 2018. He had studied the map of places where HALO worked and decided to try to make team leader, develop his English and transfer somewhere he had no ties. But only a small proportion of de-miners climb the ranks at HALO, and few make it into international management. After six months on the job, Dima had not yet been invited to train for a higher-level position and had changed teams several times – red flags in an industry requiring consistency and cooperation. One problem was likely Dima's tendency to question authority; another issue might have been his involvement in a nationalist political organisation – a liability for HALO, which portrays itself as non-partisan. By spring 2019, Dima had left de-mining.

Explosives clearance is not a conventional career choice. While some of HALO's employees joined the organisation for professional reasons – an interest in NGOs, a background in geographic information systems, an interest in explosives management – Gena, Dima and their teammates overwhelmingly came to de-mining because their employment options were limited, and because HALO seemed to offer something better. For Gena, HALO promised steady, official employment near his home. He could attend to his personal projects and save for retirement while improving his community. Dima's reasons for joining HALO were also personal. He became a de-miner for the money, the travel and advancement opportunities, and because he thought it might offer a means of managing his complex relationship with family and country.

It is tempting to say something grand about Gena and Dima, that their relationships to HALO represent, for example, the difference between those who grew up with the security of the Soviet Union and those who entered adulthood without it; the family man vs the flexible young worker; or how people deprived of other choices find potential in unconventional career paths. But I would take them as individuals who saw, and took advantage of, an endeavour offering things exceedingly rare in war-affected places: regular employment, financial stability and, perhaps most importantly, opportunity for the future. While the idea of explosives clearance as a project that is not temporary, that might very well outlive all of us, can certainly be experienced as harrowing, for some of my interlocutors it was also a source of hope.

The Revolving Door: (De-)Militarisation and Interchangeable Expertise

Gena and Dima were far from the only de-miners who told me they intended to stay with HALO for a very long time. It turned out, however, that HALO had tremendous problems retaining staff. First, those who worked locally found it difficult to balance HALO's rigid schedules and rules with other responsibilities and social relationships, and those who travelled soon tired of being on the road. Second, HALO promised opportunities for advancement, but few recruits climbed the ranks. Further, de-mining work is physically and mentally difficult; my interlocutors explained that most people could only do it for so many cycles before burning out. Additionally, at the time of my research, there were other jobs to choose from. In Kramatorsk, one could work for any number of relief organisations, and in seaside Mariupol, where HALO established a large field office, factories attracted HALO staffers with competitive salaries and a more relaxed lifestyle. Finally, there was the problem of the ‘boom’. For some de-miners and their loved ones, explosives clearance ultimately felt too risky. For others, the job lacked adventure, so they sought more stimulating work elsewhere – for example, in the army.

In 2018, HALO's fiercest competitor for recruits was the Ukrainian military. Once dreadfully underfunded, after 2014 the military became a desirable employer for some Ukrainians. HALO raised its salaries to match the military's, but it could not offer what some of its de-miners sought: opportunities to actively and openly defend Ukraine, or to actually handle explosives, not merely locate them. For those pursuing careers in explosives management, moving back and forth between HALO and the military made professional sense, and some used one organisation as a means of moving up the ladder at the other.

The revolving door between HALO and the Ukrainian military, particularly during a time of war, further muddles the question of what a de-mining project should achieve. De-mining projects are ostensibly about de-militarisation of land and people. However, the longevity of UXO and the duration of de-mining efforts create conditions in which the same people can be involved in either placing or removing landmines. While it is not unusual for military, or former military, to engage in the clearance of explosives they or their peers once laid, in wartime Ukraine, one might also move from humanitarian de-mining into the military. My Ukrainian interlocutors were not uniformly opposed to the use of landmines, but rather concerned about unmarked minefields and other hazards left over from battle. The 1997 Ottawa Convention (the ‘Mine Ban Treaty’), multiple de-miners reminded me, only applies to anti-personnel mines, so Ukraine, a signatory, had not violated it by laying anti-tank devices. Further, they reasoned, the conflict had not concluded, so if minefields were an effective deterrent to Russian invasion, then it was sensible to keep them. Although my interlocutors overwhelmingly desired peace, many suspected hostilities would reignite. For them, this both legitimated the continued use of landmines and furthered their perception that clearance work would continue for years to come.

In short, many of my interlocutors saw no contradiction in working for the military vs HALO, in arming vs disarming the landscape. This is another way in which landmine clearance unsettles the project form: the expertise de-mining organisations recruit and produce is interchangeable with the expertise they are trying to counteract. But a recruiter at HALO's Kramatorsk office explained the revolving door in more practical terms: de-miners believed that they could always return to HALO because HALO usually took people back. The organisation understood workers needed breaks or had other ambitions, including in the military. They found it easier to give an experienced de-miner a refresher course than to train someone new. In some respects, de-mining resembles other forms of contract or ‘gig’ work in which skilled labour is rented for short periods of time. One might also find parallels in seasonal agricultural labour, particularly in how travelling de-miners moved from site to site, staying in shared housing, and saving money to send home to family or invest in personal pursuits. Such patterning reminds us that while project-based labour is often depicted as precarious, workers may take advantage of the project form to earn money when and where they wish to. Counterintuitively, temporary, but repeated or related projects – or projects that blur together such that they seem like a single, never-ending one – may offer more stability than conventional employment.

Yet we must not romanticise the freedom to choose one's projects, especially when those projects require working in a conflict zone. Further, the assumption that one may always return to HALO, or any other humanitarian organisation, is flawed. De-mining projects require significant funding, which may dry up at any time. Even if funding becomes available again, the human knowledge, institutional memory and sheer will to run such a project may be lacking. Finally, war can return.

Conclusion

Dear reader, you already know how this story ends, or at least continues. Early in the morning of 24 February 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine. They entered from the north, the south, the east and the sea, the culmination of months of troop build-ups and strained diplomatic negotiations that laid bare all the weaknesses of international law. By sunrise, Krasna Talivka was under Russian control. So was the highway down to the Luhansk People's Republic – the exact highway that HALO's de-miners had so laboriously surveyed and State Emergency Services had, in late 2019 and early 2020, finally cleared and certified mine-free.

I do not know whether my interlocutors regret the clearance work they did. I do not know whether the people who so warmly and generously hosted me in Krasna Talivka are safe, and I fear contacting them in case my doing so would make their lives even more difficult. I do know that this war will leave trails of explosive waste that will impact Ukrainian land and life for generations. I know that beyond landmines and tripwires, cluster munitions are being used, and that these, too, kill indiscriminately. I know that before the invasion, HALO evacuated its international staff, but Ukrainian de-miners remained, not only to fight, but to map where bombs were falling, to examine and disable found ordnance, to educate civilians, especially children, on how to avoid becoming casualties of landmines and other deadly waste of war. HALO has since fully re-committed to Ukraine, reinstating international staff, doubling Ukrainian staff and greatly expanding capacities in AI-assisted and mechanical de-mining, so that there might be less ‘cutting grass with scissors’ and thereby less risk for workers. However, the locations HALO's de-miners are surveying now are different from those in this study. Krasna Talivka, Starobilsk, Sievierodonetsk and Mariupol are under Russian control, so de-mining is focused near Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Kherson – places in 2018 we never imagined would see such devastation.

I have argued that explosives clearance both follows project logic and unsettles two cornerstones of the project form: that projects have ends and that they have deliverables. I have asked what sort of imaginings a seemingly interminable project enables, detailing how, in a place where the economy was doubly collapsed, and amid great political and economic uncertainty, some saw de-mining as a source of stability, treating it like reliable, well-paid seasonal labour, a springboard to future positions or even a pathway to a pension. I complicated this story by explaining that, although many of my interlocutors claimed they planned to stay in de-mining, HALO had difficulty retaining staff, and the revolving door between it and the military prompts us to question what ‘demilitarisation’ means, especially in a place as vulnerable – and as resilient – as Ukraine. Ironically, the most profound effect of humanitarian de-mining projects in Ukraine between 2015 and 2022 was likely not property restitution or environmental restoration, or even rural economic development, but an increase in military and civilian war-readiness.

This text, drafted before Russia's full-scale invasion, submitted in the weeks following and first revised at a time when Ukraine was having relative success in repelling Russian advances, goes to press at a time when Ukraine's future is especially uncertain. The human and environmental toll is overwhelming, and to think that, however the war ends, Ukraine's ‘recovery’, as it is often referred to in development circles, could take place through a series of well-intentioned ‘projects’ seems inadequate, absurd even. Indeed, one objective of this article has been to expose the limits of the project form. Yet the very concept of the ‘project’, and particularly the aid project, presupposes an ability to act on the world and to make it better. For all the inelegances of the project form, for all its vulnerabilities, for all the ways in which it fails to solve problems or misdiagnoses them in the first place, it affords both hope and a starting place. And when facing a task as monumental as clearing the explosive remnants of war, one needs both idealism and a place to begin.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Andrew Graan and Carl Rommel for inspiration, guidance, and immense patience as I prepared this article during tumultuous times. Thank you as well to Dimitra Kofti, Kim McKinson, Rosanna O'Keeffe, Leah Zani and two anonymous reviewers for close readings that tremendously improved the text. The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology funded the fieldwork and writing period for this project, and provided a lively atmosphere for thinking about how people pursue life and livelihood amid extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Most importantly, this work would not have been possible without the cooperation of the HALO Trust, the open-mindedness of my de-mining interlocutors, and the open-heartedness of my Krasna Talivkan hosts. I think of you often and hope you are safe.

Notes

1

HALO was founded as the ‘Hazardous Area Life-Support Organization’. However, the acronym is rarely spelled out.

2

Figures assembled from the 24th and 25th reports of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the situation in Ukraine.

3

It is difficult to state the precise population at the time of research, as some people were living in the village but officially registered elsewhere (this was the case with many displaced people and soldiers), and some people were living and working elsewhere in Ukraine, or abroad, and were registered in the village but not present. Additionally, Ukraine conducted its last full census in 2001. At this time, the population was recorded at 1,081, a significant decrease from the Soviet era, when numbers were over 1,500. Krasna Talivka is part of the larger Shyrokyi hromada, orrural region, which in 2020 had approximately 6,600 registered inhabitants (https://decentralization.ua/newgromada?page=71, accessed 10 June 2024).

4

In summer 2014, Ukraine repeatedly filed complaints that villages and towns on its eastern border were being shelled from Russian positions, and that its land and airspace were regularly being violated by Russian surveillance teams, drones and helicopters (Letter dated 15 August 2014 from the Chargé d'affaires a.i. of the Permanent Mission of Ukraine to the United Nations addressed to the President of the Security Council and annexes). On 25 August 2014, Krasna Talivka and the surrounding area was the site of a land (Ukrainian border patrol and militias vs Russian soldiers) and air (Russian helicopters) confrontation that left four Ukrainian servicemen dead (https://iphronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Joint-report-on-cross-border-shelling-June-2016.pdf, accessed 4 May 2024; corroborated by my interlocutors).

5

In recent years, about half of the victims have been children (Landmine Monitor 2023, https://www.the-monitor.org/media/3389440/landmine-monitor-2023_web.pdf, accessed 4 May 2024).

References

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  • Uehling, G. 2023. Everyday war: the conflict over Donbas, Ukraine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Contributor Notes

DEBORAH A. JONES is based at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany. Her research on Ukraine focuses on the multiple and sometimes counterintuitive relationships between language, violence, and peacemaking, especially in rural communities. She has recently published work on these topics in American Ethnologist, Allegra Lab, Cultural Anthropology's ‘Theorizing the Contemporary’ series, and elsewhere. She is broadly interested in how people build their lives and livelihoods amidst significant personal challenge. Email: jones@eth.mpg.de; ORCID: 0000-0002-2777-7181.

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  • Expand
  • Baker, C. 2014. ‘The local workforce of international intervention in the Yugoslav successor states: “precariat” or “projectariat”? Towards an agenda for future research’, International Peacekeeping 21: 91106.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bulakh, T. 2018. ‘Living between two fires in eastern Ukraine: sovereignty gaps in conflict-affected areas’, Journal of Extreme Anthropology 2: 118133.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Coburn, N. 2018. Under contract: the invisible workers of America's global war. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.

  • DeAngelo, D. 2018. ‘Demilitarizing disarmament with mine detection rats’, Culture and Organization 24: 285302.

  • Graan, A. 2022. ‘What was the project?’, Journal of Cultural Economy 15: 735752.

  • Graan, A. and C. Rommel 2024. ‘Projects and project temporalities: ethnographic reflections on the normative power of the project form’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 32(3): 119.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Henig, D. 2019. ‘Living on the frontline: indeterminacy, value, and military waste in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Anthropological Quarterly 92: 85110.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Hewitt, T. and R. Shenhav 2021. ‘Developing national landmine clearance capacity in Ukraine’, The Journal of Conventional Weapons Destruction 25: 3542.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Kim, E. 2016. ‘Toward an anthropology of landmines: rogue infrastructure and military waste in the Korean DMZ’, Cultural Anthropology 31: 162187.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Krause, M. 2014. The good project: humanitarian relief NGOs and the fragmentation of reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

  • Milakovsky, B. 2018. ‘Don't forget Ukraine's rural Donbas’, Open Democracy website, 24 July. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/dont-forget-ukraines-rural-donbas/. Accessed 7 September, 2024.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Pardo Pedraza, D. 2020. ‘On landmines and suspicion: how (not) to walk explosive fields’, Society & Space website. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/on-landmines-and-suspicion-how-not-to-walk-explosive-fields. Accessed 7 September 2024.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Reno, J. 2019. Military waste: the unexpected consequences of permanent war readiness. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

  • Robinson, T. and R. O'Keeffe 2019. ‘The challenges of humanitarian mine clearance in Ukraine’, Journal of Conventional Weapons Destruction 23: 1723.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Uehling, G. 2023. Everyday war: the conflict over Donbas, Ukraine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

  • Zani, L. 2019. Bomb children: life in the former battlefields of Laos. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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