War and peace

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War two modes of ‘new war’ have been distinguished. One, the Revolution in Military Affairs, transforms advanced state militaries (particularly in the global North) through an emphasis on stripped‐down, highly specialised forces deploying cutting‐edge technology with unprecedented precision. The other is waged by non‐state militias and guerrilla forces (particularly in the global South) and relies on light, even improvised weapons, focuses its violence on civilians and is implicated in the criminal circuits of a shadow globalisation. Rhetorically, the first sustains a late modern ‘re‐enchantment of war’– war as surgical, sensitive and scrupulous – whereas the second reactivates a profoundly non‐modern ‘disenchantment of war’ as indiscriminate, callous and predatory. In practice, however, each bleeds into the other, so that it becomes necessary to expose the continuing horror of wars waged by the global North. One critical response is to show the production of three spaces of advanced military violence – the abstract space of the target, the alien space of the enemy Other, and the legal‐lethal space of the exception – and then to disrupt them through a series of counter‐geographies that challenges their claims to legitimacy.

Resources, violence and the telluric geographies of small wars

“…The validity of this criminalization proposition and the distinction between "old" (politically noble) versus "new" (economically driven) small wars has remained disputed, though (Gregory 2010, Kalyvas 2001. Some of the criticisms are that firstly, it is not at all clear that violence against civilians has increased compared to earlier warfare.…”

Migration, vulnerability and the complexity of violence: Experiences of documented non-EU migrants in Slovakia

“…Theorising violence requires examining much more than the physical act of ferocity itself, as the relevant context might range from the conceptual spatialities of military conflicts (Gregory 2010) to the "waves" of emotional experiences and practices contesting domestic violence (Pain 2014). This paper maps experiences of (documented) migrants with actual physical violence, but first and foremost it explores the context of vulnerability that increases the risk of exposure to violence and inflates its consequences.…”

“Más Allá de la Frontera Letrada: El Horizonte de un Comparatismo Nuevo en los Estudios Fronterizos Unión Europea /América-Latina”

“…Esto último -auguro yo-deja un problema pendiente en los estudios sobre el papel del imperialismo en América Latina. Como Barbara Hooper y yo señalamos ya hace casi una década (2007), existe una curiosa reticencia aún dentro de la izquierda anti-imperialista europea hoy en día en asumir plenamente el "presente colonial" europeo en el imaginario político actual (para ejemplos paradigmáticos, véase Gregory, 2010, y, muy recientemente, Anderson, 2013. Ya hace tiempo, críticas geográficas tempranas de esta postura provenientes de los márgenes de la academia anglosajona (Gregson et al, 2003) habían puesto su dedo en la llaga de esta ausencia de debate sobre la colonialidad del poder europeo contemporáneo, en la cual, para los geógrafos anglosajones la Europa continental sólo representa un pasado colonial pintoresco para estudiosos de la literatura de viajes colonial (ie, colonial travel writing), mientras que la Realpolitik imperial se sitúa exclusivamen-Geopolítica(s) 2014, vol.…”