Reconstruction and Ruin
Winter 2025
MER issue 317, Reconstruction and Ruin, examines urban destruction and reconstruction as interconnected, and ongoing, processes. From the capture-and-hold strategies of militias in Khartoum to the indiscriminate use of barrel bombs in major Syrian cities, and Israel’s use of internationally supplied aerial technology to demolish cities from a distance, contemporary warfare targets civilian areas and the infrastructures necessary to sustain human life. The scale of need, the complexity of reconstruction and the intertwined character of conflict, dispossession and destruction within and between countries are without precedent and demand critical attention. What does it mean when recovery is barely finished before another wave of destruction resumes? When so-called recovery and reconstruction lead to further large-scale dispossession or displacement of civilian populations by local governments, foreign states and private enterprises? When both war and reconstruction become central means of predation and profiteering? Contributors trace these questions across multiple contexts, following how cities are destroyed, controlled and reshaped through war and its aftermath. The pieces move between physical ruin, efforts to document and quantify damage and the financial and legal frameworks that govern rebuilding. Read together they show how reconstruction, rather than neutral or complete, is a contested process that can deepen dispossession even as communities attempt to rebuild from within.