mapping

‘Stop, hey, what’s that sound?’

Posted by Derek Gregory on January 10, 2013
Posted in: arms and weapons, cartography, mapping, World War I. Tagged: , , , , . 7 comments

I’ve used this Buffalo Springfield song before -

there’s something happenin’ here
what it is ain’t exactly clear
there’s a man with a gun over there…

stop, hey, what’s that sound?

- and I’ve posted about the sound of war before too, here and here.  This post is connected to both of them, but it also follows directly from my more recent post on bodies…

McCARTHY CAn age ago Trevor Barnes recommended Tom McCarthy‘s novel C to me, and I’ve been re-reading it these last few days. There’s an extraordinary passage where McCarthy’s protagonist Serge, an observer with the Royal Flying Corps during World War I, is being driven to Nieppe when his truck  detours ‘to drop off some piano wire’ to a special unit in the woods north of Vitriers.

Inside the main [hut], he finds a huge square harp whose six strings are extended out beyond their wooden frame by finer wires that run through the hut’s air before breaching its boundary as well, cutting through little mouse-holes in the east-facing wall. In front of the harp, like an interrogation lamp, a powerful bulb shines straight onto it; behind it, lined up with each string, a row of prisms capture and deflect the light at right angles, through yet another hole cut in the hut’s wall, into an unlit room adjoining this one. There’s a noise coming from the adjoining room: sounds like a small propeller on a stalled plane turning from the wind’s pressure alone. “What is this place?” Serge asks. “You’re an observer, right?” the slender-fingered man says. Serge nods. “Well, you know how, when you’re doing Battery Location flights, you send down K.K. calls each time you see an enemy gun flash?” “Oh yes,” Serge answers. “I’ve always wondered why we have to do that …” “Wonder no more,” the man says with an elfin smile. “The receiving operator presses a relay button each time he gets one of those; this starts the camera in the next room rolling; and the camera captures the sound of the battery whose flash you’ve just K.K.’d to us. You with me?” “No,” Serge answers. “How can it do that?” “Each gun-boom, when it’s picked up by a mike, sends a current down the wires you just pissed on,” the man continues, “and the current makes the piano wire inside this room heat up and give a little kick, which gets diffracted through the prisms into the next room, and straight into the camera.” “So you’re filming sound?” Serge asks. “You could say that, I suppose,” the man concurs.

Sound ranging traces

Still puzzled, he follows the man into another hut:

The interior’s suffused with red light. At a trough propped up against the far wall, a man with rolled-up sleeves is dunking yards of film into developing liquid, then feeding it on from there into a fixing tank. As the film’s end emerges from this tank in turn, he holds it up, inspects it and tears off sections, clipping these with clothes pegs to a short stretch of washing line, from where they drip onto the discarded strips on the room’s floor below them. “Yuk,” Serge whispers beneath his breath. “What?” the slender-fingered man asks. “Nothing,” he replies. “Look here,” Serge’s guide says, unclipping a strip of the developed film and pointing at dark lines that run, lengthways and continuous, along its surface. The lines—six of them—are for the most part flat; occasionally, though, they erupt suddenly, and rise and fall in jagged waves, like some strange Persian script, for half an inch, before settling down and running flat again. On the film’s bottom edge, beside the punch-holes, a time-code is marked, one inch or so for every second. The jagged eruptions appear at different points along each line: staggered, each wave the same shape as the one on the line below it, but occurring a quarter of an inch (or three-tenths of a second) later. “So,” Serge’s elfin guide continues, “these kicks are made by the sound hitting each mike; and they get laid out on the film at intervals that correspond to each mike’s distance from the sound. You see them?” “Yes,” Serge answers. “But I still don’t—” “These ones ready to take through?” the guide asks the developer. The other man nods; with his piano-player’s fingers, the guide unclips the other drip-dried strips, then leads Serge out to yet another hut. This one’s wall has a large-scale map taped to it; stuck in the map in a neat semi-circle are six pins. Two men are going through a pile of torn-off, line-streaked film-strips, measuring the gaps between the kicks with lengths of string; then, moving the string over to the map slowly, careful to preserve the intervals, they transfer the latter onto its surface by fixing one end of the string to the pin and holding a pencil to the other, swinging it from side to side to mark a broad arc on the map. “Each pin’s a microphone,” the slender-fingered man explains. “Where the arcs intersect, the gun site must be.” “So the strings are time, or space?” Serge asks. “You could say either,” the man answers with a smile. “The film-strip knows no difference. The mathematical answer to your question, though, is that the strings represent the asymptote of the hyperbola on which the gun lies.”

Serge has stumbled into what Peter Liddle called ‘the Manhattan Project of the 1914-18 war’: sound ranging.  It was a technique first developed by the French and German militaries  – a German sound ranging analysis section is shown below – taken up (warily) by the British (Berton claims their  old-school gunners at first thought it radical nonsense) and refined by the Canadians. As McCarthy’s brilliant reconstruction shows, it involved using sound to locate enemy artillery batteries.

The usual configuration was to have six ‘Tucker’ microphone stations at carefully surveyed intervals along an arc 4000 yards behind the front line with two observation posts in front of them, all linked to a recording station in the rear by 40 miles of wire.  When the observers saw a gun flash or heard its boom they sent a signal that activated the oscillograph and film recorder.  In the course of 1916 the British established eight of these sound-ranging sections, each plotting battery positions on base maps supplied by ‘Maps GHQ’.  In ideal conditions (which were rare) the operation could be completed for a single battery within three minutes (using graphical rather than computational methods) and with an accuracy of 25-100 yards (for more, see J.S. Finan and W.J. Hurley, ‘McNaughton and Canadian Operational Research at Vimy’, Jnl. of the Operational Research Society 48 (1) (1997) 10-14).

Analysis section of German sound ranging troop 1917

The single best source on this – though the title sounds like Flash Gordon – is John Innes‘s Flash spotters and sound rangers: how they lived, worked and fought in the Great War (1935), but Pierre Berton‘s Vimy (1986) has some useful summary pages on the Canadian role in its development. There is also a truly excellent survey that places sound-ranging in the wider context of the ‘battlefield laboratory’ in Roy MacLeod, ‘Sight and sound on the Western Front: surveyors, scientists and the “battlefield laboratory”, 1915-1918′, War & Society 18 (1) (2000) 23-46.  For more technical discussions, Peter Chasseaud‘s Artillery’s astrologers: a history of British survey and mapping on the Wester Front 1914-1918 (1999) is a key source, but there is also an exemplary (short) explanation here, from which I’ve borrowed the simplified summary diagram below.

Sound ranging

The Germans were evidently impressed by the efficacy of the Allied system, as this directive issued by General Ludendorff shows:

According to a captured English document the English have a well- developed system of sound-ranging which in theory corresponds to our own. Precautions are accordingly to be taken to camouflage the sound: e.g. registration when the wind is contrary, and when there is considerable artillery activity, many batteries firing at the same time, simultaneous firing from false positions, etc. The English have an objective method (self-recording apparatus). It is important to capture such an apparatus. The same holds good on the French front.

Since most of the killing and destruction was the work of the artillery, these counter-battery operations were a crucial part of the ground war.  Multiple sources were used, including aerial reconnaissance, balloon observation and flash spotting as well as sound ranging, and when combined these could eventually locate enemy guns to within 5-25 yards.  This map of German artillery intelligence for Vimy in March 1917 shows something of the power and complexity of this ‘acoustic cartography’:

German artiller intelligence map Enemy batteries known with certainty to be firing and spotted 15 to 22 March 1917 Vimy

Maps showing the location of enemy batteries (‘Positions maps’ like the British one below) were issued on a regular and eventually even a daily basis.

Positions map. December 1917-January 1918

This was all part of a more general metricisation of the battlefield – hideously appropriate for the killing machine that was industrialized warfare – which you can also see in the ‘barrage maps’ that choreographed the moving curtain of artillery fire behind which troops were supposed to advance on the enemy lines.  John Keegan is very good on what he called ‘the mathematics of the barrage’ in his The Face of Battle, and from his aircraft high above No Man’s Land, Billy Bishop described it as ‘clockwork warfare’:

The waves of attacking infantry as they came out of their trenches and trudged forward behind the curtain of shells laid down by the artillery, were an amazing sight. The men seemed to wander across No Man’s Land, and into the enemy trenches, as if the battle was a great bore to them. From the air it looked as though they did not realise that they were at war and were taking it all entirely too quietly. That is the way with clock-work warfare. These troops had been drilled to move forward at a given pace. They had been timed over and over again in marching a certain distance, and from this timing the “creeping,” or rolling barrage which moved in front of them had been mathematically worked out.

BARRAGE MAP bataille-ypres-passchendaele-carte-secret

Here’s part of the barrage map for Vimy, which shows the calibration even more clearly:

Vimy barrage map 1917 (extract)

McCarthy captures this ‘clockwork’ movement perfectly when Serge looks down from his aircraft while spotting for artillery:

As the second-hand needle moves across the final quarter-segment of his watch’s face, Serge feels an almost sacred tingling, as though he himself had become godlike, elevated by machinery and signal code to a higher post within the overall structure of things, a vantage point from which the vectors and control lines linking earth and heaven, the hermetic language of the invocations, its very lettering and script, have become visible, tangible even, all concentrated at a spot just underneath the index finger of his right hand which is tapping out, right now, the sequence C3E MX12 G … Almost immediately, a white rip appears amidst the wood’s green cover on the English side. A small jet of smoke spills up into the air from this like cushion stuffing; out of it, a shell rises. It arcs above the trench-meshes and track-marked open ground, then dips and falls into the copse beneath Serge, blossoming there in vibrant red and yellow flame. A second follows it, then a third. The same is happening in the two-mile strip between Battery I and its target, and Battery M and its one, right on down the line: whole swathes of space becoming animated by the plumed trajectories of plans and orders metamorphosed into steel and cordite, speed and noise. Everything seems connected: disparate locations twitch and burst into activity like limbs reacting to impulses sent from elsewhere in the body, booms and jibs obeying levers at the far end of a complex set of ropes and cogs and relays. The salvos pause; Serge plots the points of impact on his clock-code chart, then sends adjustments back to Battery E, which fires new salvos that land slightly to the north of the first ones. 

There’s a lot more to say about this, which I plan to do in the full presentation, but what interests me at least as much is the way in which this precision (Gabriel’s ‘order and reasonableness’) – so clear and crystalline when plotted on maps or seen from the air – was confounded on the ground, not least by the shattered landscape of craters, trenches and barbed wire and by the vile agency of what Siegfried Sassoon called the ‘plastering slime’ that clawed and dragged at the soldiers’ bodies and which was erased from what Edmund Blunden called the ‘innocuous arrows’ and ‘matter-of-fact symbols’ of the maps and aerial photographs.

More particularly, I’m interested (here) in the production of an altogether more sensuous soundscape, part of the corpography that danced such a deadly gavotte with cartography that I sketched out in my previous post.  In Touch and intimacy Santanu Das argues that

‘The mechanised nature of the First World War severed the link between sight, space and danger, a connection that had traditionally been used to structure perception in wartime.  This disjunction resulted in an exaggerated investment in sound.’

The memoirs, letters and diaries from the Western Front confirm that the hideous noise of battle worked its way inside the very body of the soldier.  I’ve got pages of examples, but here is just one, Edward Lynch in Somme Mud (and, for that matter, in Somme mud):

‘The shells are missing us by a matter of yards.  Noise is everywhere.  We lie on the shuddering ground, rocking to the vibrations, under a shower of solid noise we feel we could reach out and touch.  The shells come, burst and are gone, but that invisible noise keeps on – now near, now far, now near, now far again.  Flat, unceasing noise.’

I’ve emphasised the passage that simply resonates with what I described previously as a haptic geography.  And so, not surprisingly, the same sources also show that, just as the landscape was inhabited, so too was knowledge of it; that knowing those deadly sounds – ‘knowing the score’, I suppose – was a vital part of staying alive.  Here is an extended passage from A.M. Burrage‘s War is war:

We are becoming acclimatised to trench warfare. We know by the singing of a shell when it is going to drop near us, when it is politic to duck and when one may treat the sound with contempt. We are becoming soldiers. We know the calibres of the shells which are sent over in search of us. The brute that explodes with a crash like that of much crockery being broken, and afterwards makes a “cheering” noise like the distant echoes of a football match, is a five-point-nine. The very sudden brute that you don’t hear until it has passed you, and rushes with the hiss of escaping steam, is a whizz-bang. For a perfect imitation of a whizz-bang, sit by the open window of a railway compartment and wait until an express train passes you at sixty miles an hour. The funny little chap who goes tonk-phew-bong is a little high-velocity shell which doesn’t do much harm. “Minnies” and “flying pigs” which are visible by day and night come sailing over like fat aunts turning slow somersaults in mid-air. Wherever one may be, and wherever they may be going to drop, they always look as if they are going to fall straight on top of one. They are visible at night because they have luminous tails, like comets. The thing which, without warning, suddenly utters a hissing sneeze behind us is one of our own trench-mortars. The dull bump which follows, and comes from the middle distance out in front, tells us that the ammunition is “dud.” The German shell which arrives with the sound of a woman with a hare-lip trying to whistle, and makes very little sound when it bursts, almost certainly contains gas.

 We know when to ignore machine-gun and rifle bullets and when to take an interest in them. A steady phew-phew-phew means that they are not dangerously near. When on the other hand we get a sensation of whips being slashed in our ears we know that it is time to seek the embrace of Mother Earth.

The end of the war was apprehended in both registers, and this frontispiece from Benedict Crowell’s Demobilization (1920) shows how an American sound-ranging station captured the moment the guns fell silent:

The end of the war: 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918

‘Stop, hey, what’s that sound?’

‘Imagination bodies forth…’

Posted by Derek Gregory on January 7, 2013
Posted in: Afghanistan, cartography, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, mapping, Syria, World War I. Tagged: , , , , , . 10 comments

Following from my previous post, I’ve been thinking a lot about bodies recently, and for two reasons.

DUDZIAK War-timeThe first is the workshop on War & Medicine I attended in Paris just before Christmas.  It became very clear early on how difficult it is to determine when military violence comes to an end; Mary Dudziak has recently written about this in her War time: an idea, its history, its consequences (Oxford, 2012), largely from a legal point of view (and not without criticism), but it’s worth emphasising that the effects of violence continue long after any formal end to combat.  This ought to be obvious, but it’s astonishing how often it’s ignored or glossed over.

Think, for example, of the continuing toll of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, recovered in detail by Catherine Lutz (who was part of the workshop) and her colleagues at the Costs of War project, which shows how ‘the human and economic costs of these wars will continue for decades’.

NIXON Slow violenceOr think of  the toxic environments produced by ecological warfare, by the use of depleted uranium in munitions, and by the continued deployment of land mines and cluster bombs – what Rob Nixon brilliantly calls the ‘slow violence’ produced by ‘ecologies of the aftermath’ (more on this in a later post):

 ‘In our age of depleted-uranium warfare, we have an ethical obligation to challenge the military body counts that consistently underestimate (in advance and in retrospect) the true toll of waging high-tech wars.  Who is counting the staggered deaths that civilians and soldiers suffer from depleted uranium ingested or blown across the desert?  Who is counting the belated fatalities from unexploded cluster bombs that lie in wait for months of years, metastasizing into landmines?  Who is counting deaths from chemical residues left behind by so-called pinpoint bombing, residues that turn into foreign insurgents, infiltrating native rivers and poisoning the food chains?  Who is counting the victims of genetic deterioration – the stillborn, malformed infants conceived by parents whose DNA has been scrambled by war’s toxins?’

(If you think we are winning the war on land-mines, especially in you are in Canada, read this).

These two contributions – and the conversations we had in Paris – rapidly displaced the lazy assumption of a politics of care in which the left mourns civilian casualties and the right military casualties. That there is a politics of care is clear enough, but there’s also a political geography: that’s written in to the biopolitical projects that are contained within so many late modern wars, and in Paris Omar Dewachi and Ghassan Abu-Sitta described how ‘care’ has become a means of controlling populations in wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria – a rather different sense of ‘surgical warfare’ from the one we’re used to – with states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar also funding the transfer of thousands of injured people from the war zones for treatment in hospitals in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.

And two brilliant medical anthropologists, Ken Macleish and Zoe Wool, brought with them vivid, carefully wrought ethnographies of injured soldiers’ bodies.  The American soldier may appear a figure of unprecedented invulnerabilty and astonishing violence – what Ken calls a figure of ‘technological magic’ produced by a ‘phantasmagoric technological empowerment of the body’ – but, as he and Zoe reminded us, soldiers are not only ‘the agents and instruments of sovereign violence’ but also its objects.  Their studies took me to places I’ve never been and rarely thought about, but I’ve been thinking about two other dimensions of their work that combined to produce my second reason for thinking about bodies.

One is the historicity that is embedded in this process.  Ken paraphrased Walter Benjamin‘s observation in the wake of the First World War – ‘the technological progress evident in modern warfare does not ensure the protection of the human body so much as it subjects it to previously unimaginable forms of harm and exposure’ – and linked it to John Keegan‘s claim in The face of battle that the military history of the twentieth-century was distinguished by the rise of ‘”thing-killing’ as opposed to man-killing weapons’ (the example he had in mind was heavy artillery).  The other is the corporeality of the combat zone.  Ken again:  ’You need not only knowledge of what the weapons and armor can do for you and to you but a kind of bodily habitus as well – an ability to take in the sensory indications of danger and act on them without having to think too hard about it first.’  In an essay ‘On movement’ forthcoming in Ethnos, Zoe develops this insight through an artful distinction between carnality and corporeality (which may require me to revise my vocabulary):

‘The analytics of movement is a turning toward emergent carnality, flesh, and the way it is seen and felt; proprioception and those other senses of sight, sound, touch, and taste through which a body and a space enact a meaningful, sensible articulation; visceral experiences forged and diagnosed through the trauma of war which also exceed its limits.’ 

an-ice-cream-warAnd so to my second reason for thinking about bodies. Later this month I’m giving a lecture in the University of Kentucky’s annual Social Theory series.  The theme this year is Mapping, and my title is ‘Gabriel’s Map‘.  This is a riff on a phase from William Boyd‘s novel, An Ice-Cream War, that has haunted me ever since I first read it:

‘Gabriel thought maps should be banned.  They gave the world an order and reasonableness it didn’t possess.’

The occasion for the remark is a spectacularly unsuccessful British attempt to defeat a much smaller German force in November 1914 at Tanga in German East Africa; the young subaltern, Gabriel, rapidly discovers that there is a world of difference between what Clausewitz once called ‘paper war’ – a plan of attack plotted on the neat, stable lines of a map – and ‘real war’.   What I plan (sic) to do is arc back from this exceptionally brutal campaign – which lasted two weeks longer than the war in Europe – to the western front.  The two were strikingly different: the war in Africa was a war of movement and manoeuvre fought with the most meagre of military intelligence, whereas the central years of the war in Europe were distinguished by stasis and attrition and involved an extraordinary effort to maintain near real-time mapping of the disposition of forces.

The point here is to explore a dialectic between cartography and what I think I’m going to call corpography.

FINNEGAN Shooting The FrontThe first of these has involved working out the intimate relationship between mapping and aerial reconnaissance (what the Royal Flying Corps called ‘shooting the front’).  There is a marvellously rich story to be told here which, among other things, shows that the stasis of trench warfare was Janus-faced: it was produced by a myriad of micro-movements – advances and withdrawals, raids and repulses – whose effectiveness depended not on the fixity of the map at all but on its more or less constant updating (which in turn means that this capacity isn’t the unique preserve of twenty-first century ‘digital navigation’).  So here I’ll show how a casaced of millions of trench maps and aerial photographs was produced, distributed and then incorporated into the field of action through copies, re-drawings, sketches and annotations by front-line soldiers.  I have wonderful, telling examples, like this one (look carefully at the annotations):

Trench map annotated

Santanu DAS: Touch an dintimacy in First World War literatureBut I also want to show (as the map above implies: all those “full of dead” annotations) how, for these men, the battlefield was also literally a field: a vile, violent medium to be known not only (or even primarily) through sight but through touch, smell and sound: what Santanu Das memorably calls a ‘slimescape’ which was also a soundscape.  This was a close-in terrain that was known through the physicality of the body as a sensuous, haptic geography:

‘Amidst the dark, muddy, subterranean world of the trenches, the soldiers navigated space … not through the safe distance of the gaze but rather through the clumsy immediacy of their bodies: “crawl” is a recurring verb in trench narratives, showing the shift from the visual to the tactile.’

This was a ‘mapping’ of sorts – as Becca Weir suggests in  ’“Degrees in nothingness”: battlefield topography in the First World War’, Critical Quarterly 49 (4) (2007) 40-55 – and there is a dialectic between cartography and corpography.

I’ve been working my way through a series of diaries, memoirs and letters to flesh out its performance in detail, but the most vivid illustration of the entanglements of cartography and corpography that I’ve found – and that I suspect I shall ever find – is this extract from a ‘body density map’ for part of the Somme.  This shows the standard trench map above a contemporary satellite photograph; each carefully ruled square is overprinted with the number of dead soldiers found buried in the first sweep after the war (between March and April 1919)…

Body Density Map, High Wood, Somme image by shipscompass on flickr

I won’t say more at present because I need to keep my powder dry for Kentucky, but I hope it will be clear by the end that, even though I’ll be  talking about the First World War, I will also have been talking about the wars conducted in the shadows of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

After Hiroshima

Posted by Derek Gregory on December 13, 2012
Posted in: air wars, art, bombing, Japan, late modern war, mapping. Tagged: , , , . 1 comment

slavick After HiroshimaFollowing my post on artists and bombing, and in particular the work of elin o’Hara slavick, elin has written with news of her new book, After Hiroshima, due in March from Daylight, with what she calls a ‘ridiculously brilliant essay’ from James Elkins.

If you’re interested in two different but none the less intimately related works, I recommend Paul Ham‘s Hiroshima Nagasaki (Doubleday, 2012), which is extraordinarily good at placing those terrible attacks in the context of a strategic air war waged primarily against civilians (according to the Air Force Weekly Intelligence Review at the time, ‘There are no civilians in Japan’: sound familiar?) – and this needs to be read in conjunction with David Fedman and Cary Karacas, ’A cartographic fade to black: mapping the destruction of urban Japan in World War II’, Journal of historical geography 38 (2012) 303-26 (you can get a quick visual version here) – and Rosalyn Deutsche’s Hiroshima after Iraq: three studies in art and war (Columbia, 2010), based on her Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory given in 2009.

You can get a preview of elin’s ‘After Hiroshima’ project here. Scrolling down that page, my eye was caught by the image ‘Woman with burns through kimono’, taken in 1945, which transported me to another ridiculously brilliant work, Kamila Shamsie‘s dazzling novel Burnt Shadows.  I’ve been haunted by it ever since I read it, and in the draft of the first chapter of The everywhere war I start with this passage from the novel:

Burnt Shadows

And this is how I go on (and please remember this is a draft):

A man is being prepared for transfer to the American war prison at Guantanamo Bay: unshackled, he strips naked and waits on a cold steel bench for an orange jumpsuit.  ‘How did it come to this?’ he wonders.  This is the stark prologue to Kamila Shamsie’s luminous novel Burnt Shadows.  She finds her answer to his question in a journey from Nagasaki in August 1945 as the second atomic bomb explodes, through Delhi in 1947 on the brink of partition, to Pakistan in 1982-3 as trucks stacked with arms grind their way from the coast to the border training-camps, and so finally to New York, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay in 2001-2.   These are all, in their different ways, conflict zones and the turning-points of empires, tracing an arc from the cataclysmic end of the Second World War through the Cold War to the wars fought in the shadows of 9/11.   In this book, I follow in her wake; I find myself returning to her writing again and again.  Although this is in part the product of her lyrical sensibility and imaginative range, there are three other reasons that go to the heart of my own project and which provide the framework for this chapter.

The first flows from the historical arc of the novel.   Shamsie is adamant that Burnt Shadows is not her ‘9/11 novel’.  She explains that it is not about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 but about the cost and consequences of state actions before and after.  Her long view reveals that the connections between Ground Zero in 1945 and Ground Zero in 2001 are more than metaphorical.  These are connections not equivalences – and far from simple – but like Shamsie I believe that many of the political and military responses to 9/11 can be traced back to the Cold War and its faltering end and, crucially, that the de-stabilization of the distinction between war and peace was not the febrile innovation of the ‘war on terror’.  I start by mapping that space of indistinction, and it will soon become clear that the dismal architects of the ‘war on terror’ (the scare-quotes are unavoidable) not only permanently deferred any prospect of peace but claimed to be fighting a radically new kind of war that required new allegiances, new modalities and new laws. Here too there are continuities with previous claims about new wars fought by the advanced militaries of the global North, conducted under the sign of a rolling Revolution in Military Affairs and its successor projects, and quite other ‘new wars’ fought by rag-tag militias in the global South: all of them preceding 9/11.

I turn to those new wars next, and this brings me to the second reason why Shamsie’s work is relevant to my own discussion.  While she was writing Burnt Shadows she used Google Earth to disclose the textures of New York City, and marvelled at how obediently they swam into view: ‘3D models of buildings, amazingly high-resolution images, links to photographs and video streams of Manhattan.’ When she turned to Afghanistan, however, all the details dissolved into ‘an indistinct blur, and the only clues to topography came from colours within the blur: blue for rivers, brown for desert, green for fertile land.’  But that was then (2006).  Three years later, a different Afghanistan was brought into view.  ‘As I click through all the YouTube links tattooed across the skin of Afghanistan,’ she wrote, ‘I encounter video clips of American solders firing on the Taliban, Canadian politicians visiting troops, Dutch forces engaged in battle, an IED blast narrowly missing a convoy of US soldiers, a video game in which a chopper hails down missiles and bullets on a virtual city which looks more like Baghdad than Kabul.’  Shamsie uses these distinctions to remind us that ‘we’re still using maps to inscribe our stories on the world.’  So we are; and throughout this book I also turn to these violent cartographies, as Michael Shapiro calls them: maps, satellite images and other forms of visual imagery. These inscriptions and the narratives that they impose have a material form, and they shape both the ways in which we conduct ‘our’ wars and also the rhetoric through which we assert moral superiority over ‘their’ wars.  Yet even as I sketch out these contrasting imaginative geographies, another indistinction – a blurring, if you like – seeps in.  For one of the most telling features of contemporary warscapes is the commingling of these rival ‘new wars’ in the global borderlands, the ‘somewhere else’ that Abdullah reminds Kim is always the staging ground of America’s wars.

And this brings me to the final reason for travelling with Burnt Shadows: Abdullah’s insistence that war is like a disease.  This is an ironic reversal of the usual liberal prescription that justifies war – which is to say ‘our’ war – as a necessity: ‘killing to make life live’, as Michael Dillon and Julian Reid put it.  They argue that war in the name of liberalism is a profoundly bio-political strategy in which particular kinds of lives can only be secured and saved by sacrificing those of others.   You might say that war has always been thus, but what is distinctive about the contemporary conjunction of neo-liberalism and late modern war is its normative generalization of particular populations as at once the bearers and the guardians of the productive potential of ‘species-life’.  Here too there are terrible echoes of previous wars, and these brutal privileges depend, as they often did in the past, on discourses of science and economics (and on the couplings between them).  But contemporary bio-politics also draws its succour from new forms of the life sciences that treat life as ‘continuously emergent being’.  This is to conjure a world of continuous transformation in which emergence constantly threatens to become emergency: in which there is the ever-present possibility of life becoming dangerous to itself.  For this reason the social body must be constantly scanned and its pathologies tracked: security must deal not with a grid of fixed objects but a force-field of events, and war made not a periodic but a permanent process of anticipation and vigilance, containment and elimination.  Mark Duffield calls this ‘the biopolitics of unending war’ – war that extends far beyond the killing fields –in which the global borderlands become sites of special concern. Its prosecution involves the production of new geographies – new modes of division and distinction, tracing and tracking, measuring and marking – that provide new ways of continuing the liberal project of universalizing war in the pursuit of ‘peace’.  In the face of all this, Abdullah had a point.

Bomb Sight

Posted by Derek Gregory on November 23, 2012
Posted in: bombing, mapping, World War II. Tagged: , , . 1 comment

Another pre-script…. Last week I noted two projects that aimed to bring drone strikes to your smart phone, but here’s one that promises to do the same for the London Blitz.  Developed by researchers at the University of Portsmouth led by Kate Jones, in conjunction with the National Archives, and working from the official wartime Bomb Census, Bomb Sight uses web and mobile mapping technology to ‘bring to life [sic] the maps that demarcate the location of [31,000] falling bombs during the London Blitz between October 1940 and June 1941.’  It’s a truly remarkable project that intends to link the sites on the map to photographs, eye-witness accounts and memories.

The project is being developed for the Android platform but there is apparently the future possibility of porting to the iPhone – assuming that Apple doesn’t find this as objectionable as it did Josh Begley‘s Drones+ app (I’m betting it won’t).

The blog recording the development of Bomb Sight includes some screen shots – I’ve pasted some below – showing detailed maps and augmented reality views that give more insight into the intended outcome.

Unlike attempts to plot drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere, the Bomb Census Survey maps produced by the Ministry of Home Security make it possible to identify locations with great (though sometimes variable) precision – a capacity that was of course unavailable to those dropping the bombs in the first place – and there is a rich vein of images and testimony to tap into too.

It’s that prospect of multi-media linkage that makes this such a brilliant project.  There have been other attempts to map the Blitz; the Guardian produced this remarkable map of the ‘incidents’ to which the London Fire Brigade responded on the first night of the Blitz, 7 September 1940, for example, and made available an online interactive so that the toll could be followed hour by hideous hour:

You need to ‘grow’ the markers on the map; the Guardian noted that each ‘incident’ typically involved multiple bombs.  But even more telling is the word itself: ‘incident’.  For, as John Strachey noted in his memoir of his time as an Air Raid Warden, it’s a bureaucratic, bloodless term:

In contrast, what Bomb Sight promises to do is not only to disaggregate each ‘incident’ to show every bomb dropped but, still more importantly, to deconstruct the very term itself: to link the bomb scatter to imagery and testimony and so give the lie to these bloodless abstractions.

Perhaps if something similar could be done for other cities around the world more people would be enraged at the continued recourse to bombing from the air as a legitimate political and military practice, and the politics of  ’banning the bomb’ might be transformed into a more general demand to ban all bombs.

If you want to see more of Bomb Sight, there’s a very good video up at YouTube:

Gaza, stripped: the deconstruction of the battlefield?

Posted by Derek Gregory on November 21, 2012
Posted in: bombing, cartography, Israel/Palestine, late modern war, mapping, media, military occupation. Tagged: , , . 11 comments

Frédéric Mégret has frequently drawn attention to the peculiar social and legal status of the battlefield:

‘[W]hilst war may and will rage, what distinguishes it from random violence is the fact that it unfolds in discreet spaces insulated from the rest of society, confining military violence to a confrontation between specialized forces whose operation should minimally disrupt surrounding life…. In that respect, the laws of war do not merely seek to regulate the battlefield. They are also part of its symbolic maintenance and even construction as a particular space defined by the norms that apply to it. In other words, the battlefield does not predate norms on warfare; rather it has always been subtly coterminous with them. The laws of war are, therefore, a crucial foundation for understanding the evolution of the battlefield and, conversely, the evolution of the battlefield is a key way in which the evolution of the laws of war can be understood.’ 

For Mégret, the deconstruction of the battlefield is now well advanced: starting in the nineteenth century, with transformations in firepower that constantly extended the range over which lethal force could be deployed, dramatically accelerated with the rise of airpower annulling the distinction between the spaces of combatants and civilians, given a further twist by remote operations conducted over vast distances from unmanned aerial systems like the Predator and the Reaper, and aggravated by the renewed significance of insurgency and counter-insurgency struggles (‘war among the people’), the relations between the spatiality of war and its legal armature have been radically transformed.  (For a visual rendering, see Mégret’s Prezi on ‘Where is the battlefield?’).

These are important ideas, but there are other dimensions that need to be taken into account when considering Israel’s latest attack on Gaza.  This is a conflict that is fully coterminous with what Helga Tawil-Souri calls Israel’s ‘digital occupation’ of Gaza.  As she writes in a superb essay in the Journal of Palestine Studies 41 (2) (2012) 27-43:

‘Disengagement has not meant the end of Israeli occupation. Rather, Israel’s balancing act “of maximum control and minimum responsibility” has meant that the occupation of Gaza has become increasingly technologized. Unmanned aerial reconnaissance and attack drones, remote-controlled machine guns, closed-circuit television, sonic imagery, gamma-radiation detectors, remote- controlled bulldozers and boats, electrified fences, among many other examples, are increasingly used for control and surveillance One way to conceptualize disengagement, then, is to recognize it as a moment marking Israel’s move from a traditional military occupation toward a high-tech one.

Rooted in Israel’s increasingly globalized security-military-high-tech industry, the technological sealing of Gaza is part of the transformation of the mechanics of Israeli occupation toward “frictionless” control that began with the first intifada and the ensuing “peace process,” which marked the shift toward the segregation of Gaza. “Frictionless” is, of course, metaphoric and purposefully ambiguous, evoking a sense of abstraction and lack of responsibility…

While high technology has become one of the means through which Israeli occupation continues, the high-tech infrastructure in the Gaza Strip — that which is used by Palestinians as opposed to the Israeli regime— is also a space of control. Technology infrastructures form part of the appa- ratus of Israeli control over Gazans. A telephone call made on a land-line, even between Gaza City and Khan Yunis, is physically routed through Israel. Internet traffic is routed through switches located outside the Gaza Strip. Even on the ubiquitous cellular phones, calls must touch the Israeli backbone at some point. Like much else about the Gaza Strip, telecommunication infrastructures are limited by Israeli policies. Geographic mobility, economic growth, political mobilization, and territory are contained, but so are digital flows: Gazans live under a regime of digital occupation.’ 

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Israel also fights in digital space.  This takes many forms, and at the limit extends into the domain of cyberwarfare (where, as the joint US/Israeli cyber-attack on Iran’s nuclear program showed, Israel possesses advanced capabilities), but in its more mundane version it can be no less effective.

One of the characteristic features of late modern war is its mediatization, and the Israeli Defense Forces have used (even ‘weaponized‘) an array of social media platforms to shape the public construction of the battlespace.  This is a far cry from its faltering efforts during the previous assault on Gaza in 2008-9, Operation Cast Lead.  Soon after the IDF assassination that sparked the renewed air campaign this month, the IDF tweeted a headshot of the dead man, Hamas military commander Ahmed al-Jabari, with “eliminated” stamped across it, and immediately followed up with a video uploaded to its YouTube channel showing the drone strike (I’m not going to do the IDF’s job for it, but if you want to see stills and screenshots you can find them here).  The IDF continued to tweet, announcing its airstrikes in 140-character containers, and also turned to Facebook, Pinterest and Tumblr to post images and infographics (or, more accurately, propagandagraphics).

The object of the exercise has been three-fold.

First, the IDF has been seeking direct – which is not to say unmediated: the clips, tweets and the rest follow an artfully pre-arranged script – and real-time access to domestic, regional and international publics.  The officer commanding the IDF’s 30-strong New Media desk (which is shown in the image on the left), Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, explained that she wanted ‘to convey our message without the touch of an editor’ and to reach those who don’t turn to print media or TV for their news.

Second, the IDF has been aggressively mobilising its supporters, inside and outside Israel, encouraging them to retweet and to post their support on Facebook: using social media to puncture what Israel routinely describes as its ‘isolation’. Time reported that the IDF had activated additional ‘gamification’ features on its blog that allowed visitors ‘to rack up “points” for repeat visits or numerous tweets’: see the image on the right; more here.

Third, the IDF apparently believes that social media can send ‘a message of deterrence’ – though its tweets have surely been as likely to provoke as to intimidate.  The campaign sparked a series of responses and counter-measures – in Gaza, Hamas and its supporters, and in particular the Al-Qassam Brigades led by al-Jabari, took to social media platforms too, though Israel’s digital occupation plainly made that a vulnerable strategy, and the cyberactivist group Anonymous claimed to have defaced or disrupted nearly 700 Israeli political, military and commercial websites – so that al Jazeera described this as a ‘mass cyber-war‘ (I think that’s wrong: it’s been a social media war, but not one that has directly produced destruction – though, as I’ll suggest in a moment, it has certainly invited it).

More on the IDF’s New Media desk from Fast Company here and from the VJ Movement below:

It’s hard to know how effective this social media blitz has been: certainly, many people have been repulsed by the way the IDF ‘cheerily live-tweets infanticide’ and ‘the apparent glee with which the IDF carries out its job.’  As John Mitchell complained, ‘Innocent people are dying on all sides, and the IDF wants to reward people for tweeting about it.’  In doing so, the contemporary rendering of war as spectacle and entertainment has been turned into something at once banal and grotesque.  Alex Kantrowitz put this well:

When a military at war asks its Twitter followers to “Please Retweet,” or check out its Tumblr, or posts an image of a rocket hooking a Prime Minister’s undergarments, it is hard not to sense a disconnect between that messaging and the bombing taking place in real life. As The Verge’s Joseph L. Flatley put it, “One liveblogs award shows or CES keynotes, not armed conflict.”

When Matt Buchanan calls this live-tweeting of military and paramilitary violence ‘the most meaningful change in our consumption of war in over 20 years’ – my emphasis – then this is war reduced to consumerism: how long before military commanders start worrying that if their ratings aren’t high enough, their audience penetration too low, their war will be cancelled?  (Not such a bad idea, you might think, until they are driven to find ways to increase their market share….) Buchanan may think this is ‘How to Wage War on the Internet’, but Michael Koplow is nearer the mark: it’s precisely How Not to Wage War on the Internet.

In fact, several commentators worry that the trash-talking between the two sides, the verbal violence of response and counter-response on Twitter, was an open invitation to extend the war beyond the words:


‘This is a new reality of war,’ Heather Hurlburt noted, ‘and I worry that it’s going to make it harder to stand down.’  The digital exchanges were immediate – not the language of reflection or diplomacy – and, whatever else they were about, were clearly intended to taunt the other side: Hamas and the IDF were both targeting audiences in Gaza (and the West Bank) and in Israel, by turns rallying their supporters and goading the enemy.  In short, here as elsewhere, there are crucial connections between the physical and virtual worlds that, in this case, may work to inflame the violence.

Yet for all this the digital battlespace can work to reinstate the traditional battlefield – at least virtually and rhetorically.   This is one of the maps circulated through the IDF’s social media platforms:

And here is the equivalent map published online by the New York Times, updated yesterday:

Here the map speaks power to truth: the ‘battlefield’ has been radically extended so that, as always, the terms of an an intensely asymmetric struggle are radically reversed.  The disproportionate concentration of Israeli firepower on Gaza is erased, while virtually all of Israel – including, as we have been endlessly reminded, for the very first time Jerusalem – is threatened by Hamas.

The Times did at least include this, separate map of Gaza:

The map plots (in red) the sites of IDF leaflet drops (really).  So we have one map showing Hamas rocket ranges and ‘cities taking enemy fire’, and the other showing paper dropped on a captive population…

UPDATE: More on this from Craig Jones here.

If you want to find more meaningful maps that take in both Israel and Gaza, including air strikes and rocket attacks, deaths and casualties on both sides, you can find them at al Jazeera here.  I’ve pasted an extract from the plot of air strikes below.

Seen like this, I’ll leave the last words to Helga Tawil-Souri:

“The underlying reasons of Israel’s propaganda are to silence the enemy, gain international support and justify wars… Their goal has not fundamentally changed over the years, only the platforms on which these are disseminated.” 

Drone’s eye view

Posted by Derek Gregory on November 13, 2012
Posted in: Afghanistan, drones, forensic architecture, mapping, Pakistan, Yemen. Tagged: , , . 5 comments

I expect many readers will remember  that Apple rejected NYU grad student Josh Begley‘s Drones+ app last August.  It did so three times and for a multiplicity of confusing – and frankly shifty – reasons.  Apparently it was neither ‘useful’ nor ‘entertaining’; then it presented ‘excessively objectionable’ content (something to take up with the Pentagon and the CIA, surely?). As Danger Room explained, the app was bare bones stuff:

When a drone strike occurs, Drones+ catalogs it, and presents a map of the area where the strike took place, marked by a pushpin. You can click through to media reports of a given strike that the Bureau of Investigative Reporting compiles, as well as some basic facts about whom the media thinks the strike targeted.

All the more ironic, really, since the US military makes extensive use of smart phone technology – including its own (restricted) apps for the iPhone.  More on that here and here and here.

But for the past several weeks James Bridle – of New Aesthetic fame – has been posting satellite images of the distant places where drone strikes are recorded by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism to Instagram: and, as the image below shows, you can view these on your iPhone…

There are, of course, difficulties in pinpointing the locations of drone strikes– and James is evidently very well aware of them – but on his Dronestagram website he explains his desire to convert abstract targets into physical places in terms that resonate beautifully with the arguments I’m trying to develop in Deadly embrace:

The political and practical possibilities of drone strikes are the consequence of invisible, distancing technologies, and a technologically-disengaged media and society. Foreign wars and foreign bodies have always counted for less, but the technology that was supposed to bring us closer together is used to obscure and obfuscate. We use military technologies like GPS and Kinect for work and play; they continue to be used militarily to maim and kill, ever further away and ever less visibly.

Yet at the same time we are attempting to build a 1:1 map of the world through satellite and surveillance technologies, that does allow us to see these landscapes, should we choose to go there. These technologies are not just for “organising” information, they are also for revealing it, for telling us something new about the world around us, rendering it more clearly.

History, like space, is coproduced by us and our technologies: those technologies include satellite mapping, social photo sharing from handheld devices, and fleets of flying death robots. We should engage with them at every level. These are just images of foreign landscapes, still; yet we have got better at immediacy and intimacy online: perhaps we can be better at empathy too.

You can follow the images here and in much more detail via tumblr here.  More information here.

This comes at an opportune moment since I’ve been talking this week with Susan Schuppli and Eyal Weizman at Forensic Architecture about a collaborative, interactive project to bring together all the available data on drone strikes.

Geopiracy

Posted by Derek Gregory on August 22, 2012
Posted in: mapping, Mexico. Tagged: , . 1 comment

Hard on the heels of my post about the Human Geography Summit (below), comes news of Joel Wainwright‘s Geopiracy: Oaxaca, militant empiricism and geographical thought (forthcoming from Palgrave Pivot in October):

Why have geographers remained so quiet about the resurgence of military funding for geographical research? Joel Wainwright argues that the underlying problem stems from our epistemic commitment to empiricism. Much as some would like to deny it, many geographers are executing their own ‘expeditions’ in the spirit of Isaiah Bowman, the early twentieth-century geographer who shaped the discipline’s empiricist epistemology while helping the US to build its empire (and from whom the Expeditions take their name). Geopiracy delivers a critique of the ‘Bowman expeditions’ – a project through which geographers, with funding from the US Army, are mapping the ‘human terrain’ of foreign lands. Since the beginning of the controversy surrounding the Bowman expeditions, the discipline of geography has been rocked by debates concerning research methods, the military, and the effects of geospatial technologies on everyday life. Although the ‘Oaxaca controversy’ has fomented intense discussions, the questions it raises are far from resolved. Geopiracy offers a postcolonial critique of human geography today – one that draws on contemporary social theory to raise unsettling questions about the nature of geography’s disciplinary formation.

If you don’t know the background, Neil Smith‘s American Empire (2003) offers a searching examination of Bowman – ‘Roosevelt’s Geographer’ – and Zoltan Grossman provides a series of really helpful links to the contemporary controversy surrounding the Bowman Expeditions/México Indígena project here.  There’s also an online documentary, ‘The Demarest Factor: US military mapping of indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico’, here.

Most of us are probably familiar with the lively debate in Anthropology about the cultural turn in counterinsurgency and, in particular, the enlistment of anthropologists in the US Army’s Human Terrain Teams and the like.  If you’re not, then check out the Network of Concerned Anthropologists.  But anthropologists aren’t the only scholars who should be concerned about the weaponization of culture and the growth of the Military-Academic-Industry-Media complex (MAIM for short).  As Joe Brian put it in an editorial in Political Geography, ‘Geographers can ill-afford to sit this debate out, lest the discipline become a means of waging war by other means.’

True enough – but, as the Human Geography Summit reveals, the train left the station long ago.  In any case, geographical knowledge is not enclosed by the discipline of Geography.  Our primary concern should not be disciplinary purity – not Joel’s or Joe’s intention, I know – but the development and dissemination of insurgent geographies that not only expose but also replace violent formations like those documented in Geopiracy.

Counterinsurgency and the humanitarian present

Posted by Derek Gregory on July 30, 2012
Posted in: cartography, counterinsurgency, humanitarianism, Israel/Palestine, mapping. Tagged: , , , , . 2 comments

Laleh Khalili – whose work on the new and old classics of counterinsurgency,  on the gendering of counterinsurgency, and on the location of Palestine in global counterinsurgency – is indispensable, has just alerted me to the fate (Fate?) of one of its principal architects, David Kilcullen.

In The accidental guerilla and other writings, Kilcullen – Petraeus’s Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser in Iraq – repeatedly turned to bio-medical analogies to advance a bio-political vision of counterinsurgency: insurgency as a ‘social pathology’ whose prognosis can be traced through the stages of infection, contagion, intervention and rejection (‘immune response’).  In an interview with Fast Company, Kilcullen now explains that he

“came out of Iraq with a real conviction that we tend to think that a bunch of white guys turning up with a solution fixes all the problems. It doesn’t work like that. You actually have to really build a collaborative relationship with the people on the ground if you want to have any hope of understanding what’s going on.”

Kilcullen’s contract ended when the Obama administration came into office, and he founded Caerus Associates.  The company advertises itself as ‘a strategy and design firm’ that works to ‘help governments, global enterprises, and local communities thrive in complex, frontier environments.’  It claims to ‘bring the system into focus’ by providing ‘strategic design for a world of overlapping forces — urbanization, new market horizons, resource scarcity and conflict — to build resilience and capacity.’   The company explains its ‘strategic design process’ here, and Kilcullen’s vision of systems analysis is sketched here.  This may sound like the rapid-fire buzz-words that corporate start-ups typically shoot at their clients, but Kilcullen provides Fast Company with a sawn-off version (it’s really hard to avoid these metaphors…):

“We’re two-thirds tech, one-thirds social science, with a dash of special operations… We can go out in a community and say, ‘Let’s map who owns what land,’ or ‘Let’s map who owes the local warlord money,’ or ‘Let’s map the areas in the city where you don’t feel safe.’”

This chimes with Kilcullen’s famous description of contemporary counterinsurgency as ‘armed social work’, and in an interview with the International Review of the Red Cross published in September 2011 Kilcullen extended his vision of ‘military humanism’ beyond insurgency thus:

‘The methods and techniques used by illegal armed groups of all kinds are very similar, irrespective of their political objectives. So whether you’re talking about a gang in the drug business in Latin America, or organized crime in the gun-running or human smuggling business, or whether you’re talking about an insurgency or perhaps even a civil war involving tribes, you will see very similar approaches and techniques being used on the part of those illegal armed groups. That’s one of the reasons why I believe counter-insurgency isn’t a very good concept for the work that the international community is trying to do. I think that the idea of complex humanitarian emergencies is actually a lot closer to the reality on the ground. You almost never see just one insurgent group fighting an insurgency against the government anymore. What you typically see is a complex, overlapping series of problems, which includes one or more or dozens of armed groups. And the problem is one of stabilizing the environment and helping communities to generate peace at the grassroots level – a bottom-up peace-building process. And that’s not a concept that really fits very well with traditional counter-insurgency, which is about defeating an insurgent movement and is a top-down, state-based approach. What you have to do is create an environment where existing conflicts can be dealt with in a non-violent way.’

This is a remarkable passage for several reasons: the focus on ‘techniques’ not ‘objectives’, which works to de-politicize and de-contextualize a range of different situations in order to generalize about them, the appeal to a collective “international community” whose only interest is a generic “peace”, and hence the passage to what Eyal Weizman calls ‘the humanitarian present’. I think that’s also a colonial present, not surprisingly: ‘humanitarianism’ was often the velvet glove wrapped around the iron fist of colonialism.  But what Weizman sees as novel about the present is the way in which its ‘economy of violence is calculated and managed’ by a series of moral technologies (the term is Adi Ophir‘s) that work to continue and legitimize its operation.  In other words, there is today an intimate collusion of the ‘technologies of humanitarianism, human rights and humanitarian law with military and political powers’.

Despite  the reference to ‘special operations’ in the Fast Company interview – something which makes me think that Obama would have found Kilcullen’s continued advice invaluable – Kilcullen insists that it’s a collaborative process:

“We specialize in working with communities that are under the threat of violence in frontier environments, and I think to some extent that distinguishes us a little bit from other people. Sure we can give a slick presentation in a hotel room, but what we can also do is walk the street in dangerous places, engage with communities, and figure out what needs to happen. It’s not us figuring it out, it’s them telling us, but often we find that no one’s ever been there and asked them before.”

‘Dangerous places’, ‘frontiers’: this is still the language of adventurism.  It recalls Zygmunt Bauman‘s ‘planetary frontierland’, and even more Mark Duffield on the ‘global borderlands’:

‘The idea of the borderlands … does not reflect an empirical reality.  It is a metaphor for an imagined geographical space where, in the eyes of many metropolitan actors and agencies, the characteristics of brutality, excess and breakdown predominate.  It is a terrain that has been mapped and re-mapped in innumerable aid and academic reports where wars occur through greed and sectarian gain, social fabric is destroyed and developmental gains reversed, non-combatants killed, humanitarian assistance abused and all civility abandoned.’

It’s not surprising, then, that in the IRC interview Kilcullen should make so much of establishing ‘the rule of law’: ‘It’s a set of rules which has predictable consequences and allows the population to feel safe, and helps them know what they need to do in order to be in a safe place.’  He makes it clear that, in many (perhaps most) circumstances ‘bottom-up, community-based law, which can be transitional justice, or customary law, applied by traditional courts or religious courts, is as effective and possibly even more effective in the initial stages than central-state structures.’   But this ignores the multiple ways in which law (including international humanitarian law) is not apart from conflict but is almost always a part of conflict: as Weizman has it, ‘international law develops through its violation.  In modern war, violence legislates.’

One could say much the same about maps.  Mapping is not a neutral, objective exercise; mapping is performative and its material effects depend on the constellation of powers and practices within which it is deployed. Kilcullen’s injunction – “Let’s map” – glosses over who the ‘us’ is, who is included and who is excluded, and the process through which some mappings are accorded legitimacy while others are disavowed.  This is also one of Weizman’s central claims, not least in his exposure of the torturous mappings that issued in the  Hollow Land of occupied Palestine.

Weizman’s particular focus in his discussion of the humanitarian present is Gaza, and this winds me back to Laleh Khalili’s work which brilliantly re-reads counterinsurgency in occupied Palestine contrapuntally with US counterinsurgency practices elsewhere.  Her Essential Reading on Counterinsurgency was published by Jadaliyya, and her forthcoming book, Time in the shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford University Press, October 2012),  engages with a Medusa’s raft of counterinsurgency adviser-survivors, including Kilcullen and Andrew Exum (Abu Muqawama).

And so a final question: how would ‘strategic design’ and a ‘collaborative process’ help the people of Gaza?  Whose ‘rule of law’ is to be established?  And which maps chart a road not only to peace but to justice for the people of Palestine?