Violent Geographies

Fear, Terror, and Political Violence

Derek Gregory, Allan Pred, Derek Gregory, Allan Pred

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415951463
• eBook ISBN: 9781135929053
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Violent Geographies is essential to understanding how the politics of fear, terror, and violence in being largely hidden geographically can only be exposed in like manner. The 'War on Terror' finally receives the coolly critical analysis its ritual invocation has long required."

—John Agnew, Professor of Geography, UCLA

"Urgent, passionate and deeply humane, Violent Geographies is uncomfortable but utterly compelling reading. An essential guide to a world splintered and wounded by fear and aggression—this is geography at its most politically engaged, historically sensitive, and intellectually brave."

—Ben Highmore, University of Sussex

"This is what a 'public geography' should be all about: acute analysis of momentous issues of our time in an accessible language. Gregory and Pred have assembled a peerless group of critical geographers whose essays alter conventional understandings of terror, violence, and fear. No mere gazetteer, Violent Geographies shows how place, space and landscape are central components of the real and imagined practices that constitute organised violence past and present. If you thought terror, violence, and fear were the professional preserve of security analysts and foreign affairs experts this book will force you to think again."

—Noel Castree, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University

"A studied, passionate and moving examination of the way in which the violent logics of the 'War on Terror' have so quickly shuttered and reorganized the spaces of this planet on its different scales. From the book emerges a critical new cartography that clearly charts an archipelago of a large multiplicity of 'wild' and 'tamed' places as well as 'black holes' within and between which we all struggle to live."
—Eyal Weizman, Director, Goldsmiths College Centre for Research Architecture

Introduction

Derek Gregory and Allan Pred

 

 

Political violence takes many forms, and in this collection we have all tried to respond to its contemporary versions in different ways. As a group, we work with different theories, we analyze different materials, and we write in different voices, so this is not a manifesto. Neither is it a gazetteer, because no single volume (not even a library) could encompass the violence that animates our world. Some of the places and events we write about will be familiar; others will not; and many more, including some that haunt the headlines every day, are absent. But our aim is neither to provide some grand theory of political violence nor a comprehensive rendering of its varied instances and implications. This is simply a collective attempt to work through some of the ways in which a critical geographical imagination can illuminate the spaces through which terror, fear, and political violence are abroad in the world. Here we want to draw out a number of themes that run through the collection.

The immediate provocation for our project was a twin series of responses to the murderous events of 9/11. On one side, there were those who reduced the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to a barbarism that passed all understanding. Any attempt at explanation was vilified as exoneration. Terrorism was located beyond the boundaries of civilization and lodged in the pathologies of those who hammered so destructively at its gates. The cry was soon taken up by others, who dismissed any opposition to the sovereign powers of the security state as “terrorism,” and who enlisted the rhetoric of the “war on terror” as a means of legitimizing and intensifying their own apparatus of repression. On the other side, there were those who proposed a purely technical or instrumental response to 9/11, drawing on political technologies (that were also geographical technologies) to profile, predict, and manage the threat of terrorism as an enduring mode of late-modern government. The emphasis was on geographies of risk assessment, on geospatial data management and modeling, and on the vulnerability of biophysical and built environments to terrorist attack.

These two approaches were closely connected; in fact, the one was an inverse of the other. Where the first drew its energies from a more or less “popular” geographical imaginary, reproducing its publics through an assiduous dissemination of prejudice, the second offered an “expert” solution framed by the privileges of a supposedly objective science. Where the first directed attention toward the deviant “others” scurrying away in the interstices and beyond the bounds of “our” spaces, the second was focused firmly on protecting our own spaces: “homeland security.” One conjured up wild spaces, the other safe spaces. As one commentator put it shortly after 9/11, the world’s wild zones and safe zones collided over New York City (a global cartography that, as Simon Dalby shows, draws a red line right through the “war on terror”).

We regard both responses as crucial failures of a geographical imagination, and one of the purposes of this book is to explain why: to expose the assumptions they make and the consequences they have. But the book has a larger purpose too. It is at once an intellectual and a political project in which we try to signpost other avenues of analysis that ultimately, we believe, lead to more effective and more just interventions in contemporary landscapes of terror, fear and political violence. For that reason, these chapters are not circumscribed by 9/11. Most have been touched by it in one way or another, many deal directly with the multiple geographies that swirl around it, but none takes the events of September 11, 2001 as the prism through which all political violence must now be refracted. On the contrary, one of the central assumptions that runs through the book is the need to be sensitive to the fractured histories of violence, predation, and dispossession—as material fact, as lived experience, and as resonant memory—that erupt so vividly time and time again in our own present. Thus Gerry Kearns shows how political violence in Ireland is inseparable from a colonial past that continues to haunt its post-colonial present, and argues that its contemporary political struggles are in part a struggle over the very terms in which that history is to be understood. Trevor Paglen shows how the modern production of vast tracts of Nevada as secret sites for military testing trades on a history of colonial dispossession, in which the Shoshone were placed beyond the perimeter of the American state and consigned to a “black world” where almost anything could be sanctioned. At the end of the nineteenth century the Spanish-American War gained much of its popular support in the United States through widespread revulsion at the concentration camps established in Cuba by the Spanish colonial regime; and yet after the war, as Derek Gregory shows, the United States leased Guantánamo Bay as a naval station where, since 9/11, it has reactivated a series of thoroughly colonial dispositions to establish its own war prison. The “war on terror” draws on more than a colonial past, however, and Eric Olund reveals how its racialized violence repeats in displaced and distorted form in the biopolitical strategies pursued by the United States during the First World War. And Matthew Farish shows how it continues to draw on tropes that were established in the bipolar world of the cold war. History is neither a narrative of progress nor a parade of discontinuities, then, and seen thus 9/11 becomes neither an inevitable consequence of U.S. foreign policy nor a cataclysmic event that changed the whole world.

Many of the chapters map the imaginative geographies through which political violence works. They take the cartographies of fear on which it feeds and show how these representations are never merely mirrors held up to somehow reflect or represent the world but instead enter directly into its constitution (and destruction). Images and words release enormous power, and their dissemination—or, for that matter, suppression—can have the most acutely material consequences. Thus Farish shows how Area Studies emerged in the United States as a way of localizing American militarism: the original objective was to diagnose distant dangers that were supposed to inhere within particular regions. As it turned out, Area Studies often provided much more nuanced accounts than its progenitors expected, but this has not silenced demands for caricatures that can masquerade as characterizations. Glassman provides a particularly vivid example where, since 9/11, the United States has planed away the diverse political geographies of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand to render them “uniform places of Islamic terrorist threat.” Glassman sees this as an attempt to revivify the United States’ imperial objectives in South East Asia, but he is no less sensitive to the opportunistic deployment of a parallel logic by the region’s own security states. Caricatures are not, of course, a monopoly of the political Right. Philippe Le Billon shows how advocacy campaigns against so-called conflict commodities like diamonds or oil often trade on imaginative geographies that read violence directly out of places of origin. Hegel’s ghost thus makes its ghastly reappearance as Africa is constructed as synonymous with primitivism and violence, its diamonds stained with blood, whereas Canada is celebrated as the pure and peaceful North, its diamonds untainted by violence. Campaigns like these do not really dispel the fetishism of commodities, as Marx called it, because they hide the exploitative and exclusionary histories that have accreted around them. Instead, they substitute a fetishism of place that licenses its own violence against independent, small-scale diggers and miners.

The imaginative geographies that Farish, Glassman, and Le Billon describe are more than popular prejudices. They spiral through the state apparatus, the military, the market, and even the academy. But if they are to have maximum effect then the ligatures between power, politics, and the production of public spheres (transnational and domestic) assume a crucial importance. Simon Dalby provides an incisive critique of the ways in which the geopolitical abstractions of American “tabloid realism” are currently being deployed by some commentators to advance a new military imaginary—a “new map” for the Pentagon—so that the United States’ unified combatant commands can be reconfigured and redeployed on behalf of “the core” to subdue the dangerous spaces of the so-called “gap.” This is not the logic exposed by Glassman, though it is no less disingenuous and dangerous, but what these projects (and others like them) have in common is the calculated mobilization of popular geographical prejudices for a public audience in order to (re)direct public policy and, ultimately, to re-make the world through military violence. Their mappings are simplistic, but this is their strength as well as their weakness: they provide a geopolitical equivalent of the sound-bite that so often captures the public imagination.

Both Michael Watts and Nigel Thrift pay scrupulous attention to the mediations between representation and materialization through the crucial junction term of practice, though they elaborate this in radically different ways. Watts insists that revolutionary Islam be treated as a deeply serious political project whose imaginative geographies of Euro-American modernity cannot be dismissed as so many irrational rejections of “freedom” (as the White House and Downing Street seem to think). Dalby makes much the same point: tabloid realism cannot entertain the possibility that Muslims and millions of others might resist the incursions and interventions of the global North. In the case of revolutionary Islam, Watts shows that those rejections are not the product of superstition and ignorance. This is a radically hybrid project, he argues, whose critique of colonizing modernity is derived from readings of European radical philosophy as well as Islam. It has been hardened in the crucible of corrupt and secular nationalisms, and its hideous violence is wired to the spectacular display of death now made possible by modern technologies. Thrift is keenly interested in the mobilization of those technologies too, and in the mass of witnesses summoned by them, and he urges us to attend to the ways in which radically new imaginaries of violence (his focus is on suicide bombing) have been made possible through their framing by the media but also by a deliberate aesthetics of violence and a calculated assessment of the affective landscape to which it is directed.

Now landscape is more than a metaphor, and several other chapters explore some of the ways in which the sheer physicality of landscapes can become saturated with political violence. We know that “landscape” is a freighted term and that its cultural formations do significant ideological work. Contemporary deconstructions of “the lie of the land” have shown that aestheticized landscapes typically produce their effects by artfully concealing the very work—the embodied labor—that has been invested in their production. But landscapes can embody other traces of blood, sweat, and tears, and sometimes these are not hidden at all. They are deliberately written on the face of the earth to inspire fear on the faces of those who inhabit them. Thus Ulrich Oslender shows how paramilitary and military violence in Colombia uses visible signs of its passage—destroyed houses, abandoned villages, graffiti—as a communicative strategy to create a “space of death” from which people will flee in terror, while Rupal Oza argues that in India the right-wing project of Hindutva—the construction of a purely Hindu nation-state—has proceeded in part through the forcible occupation, marginalization, and erasure of Muslim spaces from the landscape. In both cases, as in so many others documented in these pages, the state is actively complicit in the production of fear, terror, and violence.

When people flee violence in its different forms, however, seeking to escape famine, poverty, or war, they often find that they are trapped in new spaces of exclusion. Beyond the explosive war zones in Afghanistan, occupied Palestine and Iraq, so Jennifer Hyndman and Alison Mountz argue, and connected to them in innumerable ways, “a quieter, geographically more distant and dispersed war against refugees is taking place.” As they reveal in grim detail, affluent states now routinely fortify their borders against the threat of unwanted peoples, often the surplus residue of their own neoliberal and military adventures, and the physical architectures that are involved—walls, fences, detention centers and the like—depend on a dense armature of spatio-legal strategies. In fact, political violence is inseparable from the law’s own violence. Several chapters show how this works through the proliferation of spaces of exception, where “normal” laws are suspended and liberties and protections are withdrawn from particular groups of people. Hence Kearns’s demonstration of the multiple ways in which the British excluded the Irish from politically qualified life, reducing them to a bare life that, so he argues, is at the very heart of the colonial project. Similarly, Paglen’s “black world” is more than a cartographic silence (though it is that): it is also “a legal nowhere” where laws do not apply and things can be done in secret. In his account Groom Lake (Area 51) emerges as a veritable laboratory of exception, where, “by producing nowhere in the testing sites of Nevada the U.S. rehearses its ability to reproduce nowhere. Elsewhere.”

This sense of the seriality of exception, of the indistinction between law and violence being reproduced at countless replicant sites, runs through several other chapters. In modern Turkey, law and violence constantly fold into one another in a limitless zone of indistinction from which there is seemingly no escape for the poor, marginalized and disadvantaged. A state of emergency prevails in the south-eastern provinces, but according to Anna Secor’s painstaking reconstruction many Kurdish migrants find that it precedes them to Istanbul. There too the violence of the state is everywhere, punctuating their lives at roving military checkpoints that can appear anywhere at any time, and yet also nowhere: formless, amorphous and in the shadows. In much the same way, Olund suggests that “the United States’ spaces of racialized violence can occur anywhere”—Chicago’s O’Hare airport, the Macedonian border (the site of an “erroneous rendition”), or the U.S. Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay—and Gregory’s recovery of the circuits between Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and the detention and interrogation centers and “black sites” within the global war prison traces this geography of dispersion and dissimulation in detail. Like many other contributors, Gregory’s view of space is an active, operative one. He understands these sites as spacings through which the indistinctions between law and violence fold in and out of the cages where those who have been placed outside the sphere of the human are confined and tortured.

These chapters and other like them confound the usual distinctions between “us” and “them.” They show that terror and torture are not the exclusive property of others, but inhabit the central structures of our own societies too. For that reason, they extend far beyond the integuments of political and military power, and several chapters disclose the pervasive intimacy of terror, fear, and violence in our contemporary world. It is vividly present in the wretched experiences of Secor’s Kurds or Oslender’s Afro-Colombian communities, and Stephen Graham sees this as a calculated strategy of the contemporary war machine. Modern war, so he suggests, is increasingly focused on degrading (“contra-functioning”) the infrastructure that makes everyday life possible. The strategy of engineering system collapse has become central to the American and Israeli militaries, for example, and as Graham’s case studies from Iraq show with a visceral clarity, it can reduce civilian populations to bare life just as effectively as making them the direct targets of military violence. Mitchell Gray and Elvin Wyly repatriate this devastating logic to the United States through their “terror city hypothesis.” This model shows how the infrastructural dependence of everyday life has become saturated by a pervasive discourse of risk and fear, and Gray and Wyly suggest that this extraordinarily volatile combination works to militarize urban policy, planning, and development and to provide new arenas of capital accumulation. Its toxic effects do not end there. Cindi Katz argues that ordinary insecurities now so comprehensively inhabit everyday life in American cities that troops on the street and security screens around major buildings are taken for granted. She doubts that most people are made any safer as a result of these stylized performances of secu-rity—a sort of street theater—that she sees as tacit invitations to accept the militarization of everyday life as normal and even desirable. These invitations are embossed by imaginative geographies of the dangerous other, a capillary sense of alien infiltration and circulation, so that what Katz calls “banal terrorism” is enlisted in the service of a no less banal (and no less effective) nationalism: “terror is mobilized to solidify a porous nation.” Allan Pred agrees with Katz’s assessment, and his satire on the Homeland Security Advisory System is a devastating indictment of the ways in which the Bush administration has manufactured fear in a calculated dissemination of what he calls “situated ignorance” in order to deflect attention from its own failings (“weapons of mass distraction”) and to legitimize its military adventurism and political repression.

But we do not end with a simple plea for what Donna Haraway calls situated knowledge to replace situated ignorance and its attendant prejudices, half-truths, and lies. Part of her manifesto was a call to reach out from our different positions, to engage in conversations with others in different situations and to enter into solidarities with them, not so much as to overcome our limitations and partialities as to recognize them for what they are. What can emerge from this, too, is a developing sense of what we share as well as what divides us, and, above all, a principled refusal to exclude others from the sphere of the human. This is vitally important work, but so too is an engagement with the politics of fear, terror and violence. For us, given our locations, this takes place within the academy—through the elaboration of studies like those presented in these pages—but it neither begins nor ends there. It involves public address (and response) as an ethical and intellectual responsibility, it involves the fostering of a critical public culture as an indispensable part of any genuinely democratic politics, and it involves showing how political violence compresses the sometimes forbiddingly abstract spaces of geopolitics and geo-economics into the intimacies of everyday life and the innermost recesses of the human body.

2

Bare Life, Political Violence, and the Territorial Structure of Britain and Ireland

Gerry Kearns

When civilian deaths from high-altitude bombing are treated as collateral damage, when people are held without charge and abused in pursuit of evidence in a war on terror that sets aside international law and human rights, then, truly some lives are being treated as if they were either not worth living or not worth protecting. This is the world that Giorgio Agamben has described as the “state of exception.” The United States and the United Kingdom are acting in the world as sovereign powers in just the way he described as the exercising of the right to deny to some persons proper political status, reducing them to a sort of “bare life” where their very biological existence continues at the sufferance of the sovereign or its agents.¹ Exceptional measures threaten to become the norm, yet the forces of colonial hubris and civilizational arrogance now abroad recall earlier times.

The colonial state has repeatedly made bare life the basis of sovereignty. Agamben has argued that political communities are formed by exclusion, not inclusion; the sovereign being the agent with the right to exclude.² Agamben sees the concentration camp as the c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Bare Life, Political Violence, and the Territorial Structure of Britain and Ireland
• 3 "An Unrecognizable Condition Has Arrived"
• 4 Cosmopolitanism's Collateral Damage
• 5 Refuge or Refusal
• 6 Imperialism Imposed and Invited
• 7 Spaces of Terror and Fear on Colombia's Pacific Coast
• 8 Fatal Transactions
• 9 The Geography of Hindu Right-Wing Violence in India
• 10 Revolutionary Islam
• 11 Vanishing Points
• 12 Groom Lake and the Imperial Production of Nowhere
• 13 Targeting the Inner Landscape
• 14 Immaculate Warfare? The Spatial Politics of Extreme Violence
• 15 The Pentagon's New Imperial Cartography
• 16 Demodernizing by Design
• 17 The Terror City Hypothesis
• 18 Banal Terrorism
• 19 Situated Ignorance and State Terrorism
• Contributors
• Index