In South Lebanon, war is lived as landscape, environment, milieu. Those pursuing life in such quarters do what they can to make-live, and their lifelines are often as vitalizing as they are deadly: tobacco farmers ally themselves with what they call a "bitter crop" that flourishes in an arid war zone, while pastoralists walk in explosive fields with their mineevading goats. These multispecies alliances flourish because they can survive the deadly infrastructures of war. Dwelling alongside two steadfast families in the borderlands of South Lebanon, this ethnography of life in war moves away from tropes of trauma to grasp a militarized world from within the lived terrain of its operations. Neither greentinged utopia nor total devastation, these resistant ecologies make being possible in an insistently deadly region. Thinking life from disastrous war zones forces anthropological theory to reckon with harsh ethnographic realities while bringing to light unsung alliances of hope for life ongoing.

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Goats remain the most viable livestock in the warzone of South Lebanon because of their compatibility with wartime environments and ordnance. They can survive periods of scarcity during active war, occupations, or invasions by foraging for food and eating almost anything. Most crucially, goats are small and light and can graze in the borderland’s many minefields without setting off the hidden explosives designed to kill humans, who are not as light-footed. In this essay, Munira Khayyat explores how an enduring, explosive military technology is both domesticated and resisted by a homegrown, anti-mine survival assemblage.