Global containments and local leakages: Structural violence and the toxic flows of shipbreaking

This article explores how ship recycling—an essential part of the shipping economy—results in breaking up toxic vessels that leak hazardous materials into coastal communities and wetlands ecologies of South Asia. Drawing on multi-scaled and multisited ethnographic fieldwork with shipbreaking workers and local fishing communities in Chattogram, Bangladesh as well as with shipbreaking yard owners, maritime consultants, and government officials, we conceptualize toxic flows as a method to trace the lived experiences of those who are exposed to industrial pollution from shipbreaking. First, we propose that shipbreaking with its local toxic leakages constitutes a form of “structural violence” where violence is built into the logic of accumulation strategies in the maritime economy and shows up as unequal power relations that produce the conditions for unequal life chances. Second, we discuss Bangladesh’s recent efforts towards ratifying the Hong Kong Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships and its potential to contain these toxic flows. Lastly, we explore how ethnographically tracing ‘toxic flows’ i.e., the movement of these toxic substances, allows us to shift scales of analysis and make visible the different ways shipbreaking is perceived to negatively affect health and social reproduction beyond the boundary of shipbreaking yards. We conclude that structural violence such as reduced life expectancies due to poisonous exposure risks becoming embedded in the logic of oceanic forms of accumulation without state regulatory enforcement and supervision.