From Military Geography to militarism's geographies: disciplinary engagements with the geographies of militarism and military activities (original) (raw)

Geography, military geography and critical military studies.

This paper is about the distinctive contributions which contemporary military geography might make to the wider critical military studies project. The paper notes the relative absence of the study of military topics across Anglophone human geography in the second half of the twentieth century, and the resurgence of interest in the spatialities of militarism and military activities over the past decade or so in tandem with the emergence of critical geography. The paper then goes on to examine three key tropes of geographical inquiry to illustrate how a critical military studies alert to spatiality might develop further. These are geography's rich tradition of research and writing about landscape, geography's engagement with concepts of representation, and geography's theorizing on scale. The paper argues that a geographically informed critical military studies can be illuminating on matters of war and militarism because of its attention to the located, situated, and constitutive natures of military power and its effects. The paper concludes with a reflexive commentary on what critical military studies might take from ongoing debates in human geography about the necessity of engagement and co-inquiry with research subjects, when a focus on military topics raises ethical questions about collaboration. We argue that transparency, accountability, and awareness of the multiple and complex politics of academic inquiry are necessarily part of the wider critical military studies project.

A genealogy of military geographies: Complicities, entanglements, and legacies

Geography Compass

This paper argues that historical geography is particularly well positioned to make insightful contributions to military geographies and critical military studies more broadly because of its commitment to critically exploring the genealogies and consequences of military violence, which are too often seen as a given or historically non-contingent. This is demonstrated by a review of existing literature which variously acknowledges the emergence of disciplinary geography in concert with the modern military, traces the contributions of geographers to and their entanglements with the military, and, which accounts for the complicities, consequences and legacies of military activities and violence through an historical lens. The paper reveals how historical geography exposes the knowledges, technologies and lives that produce and are shaped by military activities as being spatially and temporally specific. Further, its suggests future directions for historical geography that would extend and expand the discipline's attempts to more fully acknowledge the place of military geographies in our histories, politics, spatialities, cultures and everyday lives.

Parallel Landscapes: A spatial and critical study of militarised sites in the United Kingdom

There are currently 548 declared military facilities in the United Kingdom, located on 372,000 hectares of military-owned or used land. Collectively known as the defence estate, this land is used for defence and training, and constitutes approximately 1.5% of the UK surface area. The research presented here interprets this landscape and its accompanying airspaces, infrastructures and processes as a spatial phenomenon, one which is in an almost constant state of flux. This thesis is, therefore, a study of militarised space in the UK as defined by recent developments in technology, mobility and communication. It analyses the processes by which land and space become militarised within different environments and the residual effects of this on the wider fabric of civil society.

The geontological time-spaces of late modern war

Progress in Human Geography, 2021

Attending to connections between serious health conditions (cancers and congenital disorders) and weapons residues in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza, this article develops a geographical agenda for examining power in late modern war from the perspective of the ground and the life it sustains. A case is made for understanding the time-spaces of war as not compressed, vertical or remote but enduring, pedospheric and proximate in which violence emerges through processes (carcinogenic and teratogenic) that transcend boundaries between 'life' (bios) and 'nonlife' (geos). Such are the geontological time-spaces of late modern war that geographersin both 'physical' and 'human' sub-fieldsare uniquely equipped to examine.

Military Geography in the Context of Geographic Determinism

2020

The influence of geographic factors on the society as well as on different social realities had special importance within the whole history of social-philosophical thought. From this perspective, the theory of geographic determinism has emerged as an essential conception. The supporters of this theory paid special attention to the geographic factors demonstrating and underlining the importance of their place and role in the process of formation and development of various social phenomena. This article mainly focuses on the place and role of military geography in the study, organization, and modelling of social processes.