Forging fragility: Capitalogenic flows and landscapes in the Middle East

This theme issue introduces the concept of capitalogenic flows to explain how ‘fragile landscapes’ are forged across , and signify, the Middle East through infrastructures of extraction, militarisation and global supply chains. Drawing on critical political ecology and Capitalocene scholarship, we show that environmental degradation in the region is not inherent but produced through historically specific circuits and spatialisations of capital. In this sense, capitalogenic flows reveal the metabolic dimension of capital accumulation, where the circulation of commodities is inseparable from the circulation of toxicity, waste and ecological degradation. A capitalogenic perspective shifts attention from discrete sites of extraction to the circulatory relations through which value, devaluation and contamination are co-produced and unevenly spatialised. The contributions trace how such flows circulate and settle across Lebanon, Jordan, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Tunisia through ethnographically grounded studies of petro-chemical pollution, contaminated hydrological flows, agricultural runoff, waste infrastructures and surplus commodities. In doing so, the issue challenges Orientalist narratives that frame the Middle East as inherently fragile, instead situating emplaced socio-ecological degradation within wider circuits of global capital accumulation.