Author Archives: Derek Gregory

About Derek Gregory

I'm Peter Wall Distinguished Professor and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

A swarm of drone books

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From the University of California Press in February, Thomas Stubblefield‘s Drone Art: the everywhere war as medium:

What happens when a drone enters a gallery or appears on screen? What thresholds are crossed as this weapon of war occupies everyday visual culture? These questions have appeared with increasing regularity since the advent of the War on Terror, when drones began migrating into civilian platforms of film, photography, installation, sculpture, performance art, and theater. In this groundbreaking study, Thomas Stubblefield attempts not only to define the emerging genre of “drone art” but to outline its primary features, identify its historical lineages, and assess its political aspirations. Richly detailed and politically salient, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of the intersections between drones, art, technology, and power.

 

Caren Kaplan on the book: ‘”Do representations of drones that circulate in contemporary media reinforce or subvert the logic of distance warfare? Stubblefield takes a brilliantly nuanced approach in a text replete with stimulating examples to argue that ‘drone power’ in such media is always ‘distributed and elusive’ yet open to reimagination and, therefore, critique.”


From the same publisher in March, Joseba Zulaika‘s Hellfire from Paradise Ranch: on the front lines of drone warfare:

In this intimate and innovative work, terror expert Joseba Zulaika examines drone warfare as manhunting carried out via satellite. Using Creech Air Force Base near Las Vegas as his center of study, he interviews drone operators as well as resisters to the war economy of the region to expose the layers of fantasy on which counterterrorism and its self-sustaining logic are grounded.

Hellfire from Paradise Ranch exposes the terror and warfare of drone killings that dominate our modern military. It unveils the trauma drone operators experience, in part due to their visual intimacy with their victims, and explores the resistance to drone killings in the same apocalyptic Nevada desert where nuclear testing, pacifist militancy, and Shoshone tradition overlap.

Stunning and absorbing, Zulaika offers a richly detailed account of how we continue to manufacture, deconstruct, and perpetuate terror.

Contents:

Prologue: Slaughterhouse 359

1: The Real: Home of the hunters

2: Fantasy and the art of drone assassination

3: Drone wars returning from the future

4: Trauma: the killer as voyeur

5: Resistance: a harsh and dreadful love

Epilogue: Obama’s Troy: Kill me a son

Joseph Masco on the book: “Hellfire from Paradise Ranch details how the drone revolution has moved the politics of terror into an entirely new techno-political domain. We should all be grateful to Joseba Zuilaika for once again analyzing the politics of terror and seeing its revolutionary import — war always comes home. His account of drone warfare is required reading for anyone attempting to understand U.S. militarism in the 21st century.”

Coming from Rutgers University Press, also in March, Katherine Chandler‘s Unmanning: how humans, machines and media perform drone warfare:

Unmanning studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone—including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness—are achieved by displacements between humans and machines that shape a mediated theater of war. Rather than primarily treating the drone as a result of the war on terror, this book examines contemporary targeted killing through a series of failed experiments to develop unmanned flight in the twentieth century. The human, machine and media parts of drone aircraft are organized to make an ostensibly not human framework for war that disavows its political underpinnings as technological advance. These experiments are tied to histories of global control, cybernetics, racism and colonialism. Drone crashes and failures call attention to the significance of human action in making technopolitics that comes to be opposed to “man” and the paradoxes at their basis.

Contents:

Introduction
1          DRONE
2          American Kamikaze
3          Unmanning
4          Buffalo Hunter
5          Pioneer
Conclusion      Nobody’s Perfect


Coming from Oxford University Press in May/June, Michael J. Boyle‘s The Drone Age: how drone technology will change war and peace:

Over the last decade, the rapid pace of innovation with drone technology has led to dozens of new and innovative commercial and scientific applications, from Amazon drone deliveries to the patrolling of national parks with drones. But what is less understood is how the spread of unmanned
technology will change the patterns of war and peace in the future. Will the use of drones produce a more stable world or will it lead to more conflict? Will drones gradually replace humans on the battlefield or will they empower soldiers to act more precisely, and humanely, in crisis situations? How will drones change surveillance around the world and at home?

This book examines how unmanned technology alters the decision-making and risk calculus of its users both on and off the battlefield. It shows that the introduction of drones changes the dynamics of wars, humanitarian crises and peacekeeping missions, empowering some actors while making others more vulnerable to surveillance and even attack. The spread of drones is also reordering geopolitical fault lines and providing new ways for states to test the nerves and strategic commitments of their rivals. Drones are also allowing terrorist groups like the Islamic State to take to the skies and to level the playing field against their enemies. Across the world, the low financial cost of drones and the reduced risks faced by pilots is making drone technology an essential tool for militaries, peacekeeping forces, and even private companies. From large surveillance drones to insect-like micro-drones, unmanned technology is revolutionizing the way that states and non-state actors compete with each other and is providing game-changing benefits to those who can most rapidly adapt unmanned technology to their own purposes.

An essential guide to a potentially disruptive force in modern world politics, The Drone Age shows how the mastery of drone technology will become central to the ways that governments and non-state actors seek power and influence in the coming decades.

Contents:

Chapter 1: The Drone Age
Chapter 2: Automated Warfare
Chapter 3: Death from Above
Chapter 4: Eyes in the Sky
Chapter 5: Terrorist Drones
Chapter 6: The All-Seeing Drone
Chapter 7: Dull, Dirty and Dangerous
Chapter 8: The New Race
Chapter 9: The Future

For Sama

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For Sama – see my posts here and here – is now available on YouTube:

Sama is the daughter of the film-maker Waad al-Kateab and her husband Hamza, a hospital doctor and one of 32 who remained in East Aleppo.

For Sama was shot in East Aleppo; it begins in the early days of the rising against the Assad regime and focuses on life in and around two hospitals during the siege.

‘Sama’, we are told,

‘means the sky…. the sky we love, the sky we want… without airforces, without bombing… the sky with sun, with clouds, with birds…’

After their original hospital was destroyed in an airstrike – one of the doctors killed was Muhammad Waseem Maaz, who had delivered Sama (see also here and the slides for Death of the Clinic under the TEACHING tab) – they were able to move to a building ‘designed to be a hospital’ but never used and ‘not on any maps so the Russians and the regime wouldn’t know where to bomb…’

It would be the last hospital left functioning in East Aleppo, treating almost 300 patients a day.

‘Even when I close my eyes I see the colour red.  Blood everywhere.  On walls, floors, our clothes.  Sometimes we cry blood.’

 

Corporeal War

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This conference in Florence next year looks very interesting:

Spaces of War: Corporeal War, May 21st-22nd 2020
Deadline for abstracts: 10th January 2020

Building on the success of our 2018 international conference ‘Spaces of War: War of Spaces’, the Editors of the Media, War and Conflict Journal are holding our second conference at Accademia Europea Di Firenze, Florence, Italy in May 2020.

Alongside traditional papers, the expected conference programme will include film screenings and methodological workshops on Digital verification; Visuality/photography; The archive; Performance that are designed to facilitate the development of new ideas, networks and/or research proposals through dialogue with practitioners.

Conference Themes

In 2018 we were motivated by a feeling that broad theses on the transformation of war in new media environments was distracting attention from the richness of detailed work being conducted on specific cases. Macro theorisations were ignoring the varieties and intricacies of spaces through which war was being waged. That conference drew together a new generation of researchers in the field of war and media, and led to the forthcoming Spaces of War book due for publication by Bloomsbury in 2020.

But what emerged and gave meaning to the temporal and spatial dimensions of those dynamic, ever evolving spaces was the overarching theme of bodies and the profoundly corporeal, embodied nature of war and its relationship to space.

For the 2020 conference, we invite contributions that explore the intersections of body and space in the field of war and media through two broad themes:

Bodily Presence/Absence: How can research illuminate how bodies occupy, inhabit and live through and in spaces of war? When and how are bodies made visible in spaces of war, whose bodies (civic, military, technologized etc) and why? What are the implications of bodily presence and absence in relation to the transformative properties of the space? What are the consequences of post-bodily inhabitation?
Embodied Participation: How do media and digital technologies alter and shift the affective, sensory, mnemonic qualities of space? How are bodies, and the corporeal reality of war, transformed by spaces and visa versa? What are the consequences of our engagement with spaces of war for ourselves, others and the space itself?
Drawing on these broad themes and questions, the conference will showcase exciting new research in this field while pinpointing the emerging puzzles and lines of enquiry we face at the intersection of bodies, media, space and war.

We are interested in scholarly and practice contributions that speak to these themes through a range of topics across various spheres and powers relations.

While the main theme of this conference is the corporeal nature of war and its relationship to space, we also welcome papers dealing with any aspect of media, war and conflict.

Please submit an abstract of 250 words with author affiliation and brief biog to Sarah Maltby: s.maltby@sussex.ac.uk by 10th January 2020

Panel submissions are welcome. Panel proposals should include no more than 4 papers in total, a short description (200 words) together with abstracts for each of the papers (150-200 words each including details of the contributor), and the name and contact details of the panel proposer. The panel proposer should co-ordinate the submissions for that panel as a single proposal.

Registration Open: 24th January to 27th March 2020

Bombing Britain

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Ages ago, as part of my research on bombing, I drew attention to Bomb Sight  a remarkable digital mapping project that provided a detailed spatial inventory of the Blitz in London in 1940-41.

At long last there is the equivalent for the U.K. throughout the war: the digital platform War, State & Society has hosted a zoomable and searchable map (see screenshot above) produced by Laura Blomvall showing 32,000 German air raids on the United Kingdom between September 1939 and March 1945.  The first air raid of the war was 80 years ago today – 16 October 1939 – when the Luftwaffe attacked the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh.

Laura’s accompanying open-access essay is here.

An extract (referring to the map above):

When digitally mapped, the density and spread of pinned locations communicate in seconds the scale of devastation these volumes document over thousands of pages. Viewing the data in a single-color heat map format, the entire United Kingdom appears dyed in intense red, with the South East looking like an intense scarlet lake. When the heat map measures numbers of casualties instead of numbers of air raids, the picture changes to show different patterns of numerical density: Belfast, which did not show as a hot spot for air raids, shows as a hot spot for casualties; the county of Kent, a zone of heavy aerial bombardment in the first heat map, disappears as a significant location for casualties next to cities like London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Coventry, Glasgow, and Bristol. In some ways, the correlation between numbers of casualties and urban centers with dense populations seems hardly ground-breaking. However, as a tool for communicating instantaneously what [Juliet] Gardiner called “the macabre taxonomy of war” – a ranking of British cities by casualty numbers – Bombing Britain is unique and unparalleled.

The exception to the exception

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There is a stunning report (including an extended video) in today’s New York Times providing detailed evidence of Russian jets systematically attacking four hospitals in Syria in just twelve hours on 5/6 May 2019.

As regular readers will appreciate, this is a fraction of the total number of attacks on hospitals and clinics by Russian and Syrian aircraft – see my analysis in ‘Your turn, doctor’ here,  ‘Death of the Clinic’ here and a stream of subsequent posts.

There have been other attempts to attribute culpability in the past – I’m thinking here of visual analysis by bellingcat and Forensic Architecture, for example – and, as the NYT notes, ‘recklessly or intentionally bombing hospitals is a war crime, but proving culpability amid a complex civil war is extremely difficult, and until now, Syrian medical workers and human rights groups lacked proof.’  What distinguishes this (brilliant) investigation is the incorporation of flights logs and intercepts of radio communications from the Russian Air Force that for the first time clearly and unambiguously show that these air strikes were deliberate, systematic and relentless attacks on known hospitals.

Here is the first attack analysed by the NYT; I’ve grabbed the images from the accompanying video..

Nabad al Hayat had been attacked three times since it opened in 2013 and had recently relocated to an underground complex on agricultural land, hoping to be protected from airstrikes.

At 2:32 p.m. on May 5, a Russian ground control officer can be heard in an Air Force transmission providing a pilot with a longitude and latitude that correspond to Nabad al Hayat’s exact location.

At 2:38 p.m., the pilot reports that he can see the target and has the “correction,” code for locking the target on a screen in his cockpit. Ground control responds with the green light for the strike, saying, “Three sevens.”

At the same moment, a flight spotter on the ground logs a Russian jet circling in the area.

At 2:40 p.m., the same time the charity said that Nabad al Hayat was struck, the pilot confirms the release of his weapons, saying, “Worked it.” Seconds later, local journalists filming the hospital in anticipation of an attack record three precision bombs penetrating the roof of the hospital and blowing it out from the inside in geysers of dirt and concrete.

The staff of Nabad al Hayat had evacuated three days earlier after receiving warnings and anticipating a bombing [which is how journalists came to be on site to film the strike].

Another attack – detailed in the accompanying video – was on the Kafr Zita Cave Hospital (see also here).

As I’ve explained elsewhere, spaces of exception are not confined to the camp (as Agamben and others claim); war zones are also spaces in which particular groups of people are knowingly and deliberately exposed to death by removing the legal protections that would ordinarily safeguard them.  But these are not legal ‘black holes’ either.  The removal of those protections is itself (in part) the product of legal manoeuvers and, in the case of Syria, sleight of hand: Assad’s counterterrorism laws criminalised all medical aid to the opposition.  That legal armature extends beyond domestic legislation: international humanitarian law and other quasi-legal formularies (including Rules of Engagement) are supposed to afford a modicum of protection to civilians.  But throughout, hospitals and clinics are supposed to be ‘exceptions to the exception’: attacks on them, their staffs and patients are explicitly proscribed under IHL.

I’m bringing all these materials together – from attacks on hospitals on the coast of France and the Western Front in the First World War through Afghanistan (here and here) and Syria – in a major new essay: more soonest, though like most of my essays these days it threatens to metamorphose into a small book….

That essay will also elaborate the claims set out in the summary image above.  One of the crucial points to sharpen, I think, is that the exception often appears earlier in time and distant in space from the enclosed contours of the camp or even the war zone that has replaced the traditional ‘battlefield’.  I’m thinking here (in the case of the camp in the Second World War) on the systematic denigration of the Jews, the restrictions imposed on their life and movement in occupied cities, the roundups and detentions (see my lecture on occupied Paris under the TEACHING tab), their confinement to ghettoes: all of this in advance of their brutal transportation to the death camps hundreds of miles distant.  If we don’t draw attention to those preliminary steps – if we fail even to recognise them – then it will be too late: the gates of the camp will clang shut.

What has this to do with hospital attacks?   Quite simply:  if the preliminary de-certification of hospitals and doctors in opposition-held areas is allowed to pass unchallenged, if we fail to contest the claim that these are ‘so-called hospitals’ and ‘so-called doctors’ (a familiar tactic of the Assad regime and its apologists), if we fail to respect medical neutrality,  then the exception to the exception will vanish: hospital attacks will have been normalised.

Underground medicine

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In my work on attacks on hospitals in Syria I’ve drawn attention to the remarkable Central Cave Hospital (see also here and here) – and to what it says about a war when hospitals have to be excavated deep into the ground in a desperate attempt to protect them from airstrikes.

That hospital – formally, the Al Maghara (Dr Hasan al Araj) Hospital – was excavated in the side of a mountainside at Kafr Zita in Hama and opened in October 2015.  The Syrian-American Medical Society had originally proposed to build the hospital in the heart of the city, but local residents feared that doing so would turn them into targets for airstrikes.

Yet going outside and underground provided only limited protection: the hospital was repeatedly targeted by Russian and Syrian aircraft (see here and here and the videos shown by Jake Godin on Twitter here).

But as Saving Lives Underground noted (in a report co-produced with SAMS, dated May 2017), there were other cave hospitals in Syria.  Compared to basement hospitals, the cave hospital is

‘a more effective protective model, in which medical facilities are built into caves carved into the side of a mountain. This model provides reasonable protective measures, but has limited feasibility as it can only be constructed in environments that contain mountains. It requires securing the entrance to the hospital, creating an emergency exit, and ensuring ventilation, but is a comparatively inexpensive model as it relies on the existing base structure of the mountain. This model has proven to be effective when designed properly and laid out with attention to details… The largest cave hospital in Syria is the Central Cave Hospital, which is 500 – 600 meters large, contains three operating rooms, and houses a range of services…’

(The most expensive model involved ‘building a new, completely underground facility. A hospital is built several meters below the surface, has a thick, reinforced concrete frame, and is covered by protective ground backfill to create the additional layer of safety. The advantage of this model is that it can be replicated anywhere with few modifications because of its standard design. However, as it involves the construction of a completely new structure, it is the most expensive model and requires the longest time to completion.’)

So there have been other cave hospitals.  Now the Toronto International Film Festival features a new documentary by the co-director of the award-winning Last Men in Aleppo, writer-director Feras Fayyad, called The Cave.  This was shot at another Cave Hospital in East Ghouta between 2016 and 2018 (for background, see my posts on the siege of Ghouta here and here).

Here is the Q&A with the cast and crew at TIFF:

The Cave should be shown in theatres in the fall, and (as you can see from the trailer below) is co-sponsored by National Geographic and will appear in its new documentary line-up:

The Cave follows another documentary on the work of doctors, nurses and patients under siege in Assad’s (and Putin’s) Syria, For Sama: see my notice here.

Like For Sama it too draws attention to the multiple ways in which gender and patriarchy play out in these desperate circumstances.  The Cave is run by a woman, Dr Amani Ballor, and one reviewer notes: ‘When one man shows up to get medicine for his wife, he lectures the staff that women should be “at home with the family,” not running a hospital. “We voted twice,” says a male doctor on staff. “She won both times.”’

Or again, in a detailed review of the film, Eric Kohn writes:

What makes this determined young woman tick? Speaking through a voiceover that guides the narrative along, Amani recalls growing up under “a racist and autocratic regime,” and how the war drove her to “respond to the terrible reality” through her work. At one point, a male relative of one of her patients confronts her, demanding a man be in charge. When one of Amani’s peers comes to her defense, the showdown serves as a keen snapshot of the doctor’s struggle on several fronts. Beyond encapsulating the city’s devastation, “The Cave” is an implicit critique of a war-torn society still at the mercy of antiquated values. Even in this desperate moment, her selfless acts face backlash from stern traditionalists. With nothing to lose aside from the hospital itself, Dr. Amani has no qualms about speaking her mind. “This religion is just a tool for men,” she says.

Writing in Variety, Tomris Laffly describes Dr Amani working with two other women, Dr Alaa and a nurse Samaher, as a vital thematic arc of the film:

In the end, it is the feminine camaraderie and understanding that stands tall as the backbone of the film and perhaps even the entire operation. Despite having their physical safety incessantly threatened — above the ground, there is nothing but a wasteland of a city nearly flattened by bombs — and capability repeatedly questioned by male patients, the trio of women somehow manages to carve out an alternative space for themselves. In that, they criticize religion as an enabler of falsely perceived male superiority and work side-by-side with male colleagues as equals, even if their parity comes as a consequence of the desperate aboveground circumstances.

Much to think about here, clearly: another of the essays on which I’m still working, converting these various posts into long form (and always, so it seems, into very long form!), recovers the genealogy and the geography of hospital attacks in modern war – from the bombing of hospitals on the Western Front in the First World War (there’s a preliminary version here, but I’ve since done much more work) right through to the US bombing of the MSF Trauma Centre in Kunduz (see here and here) and the continuing attacks on medical care in Syria.  I’ll do my best to keep you posted.

Siege on film

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Two new films about sieges in later modern war…. tragically not the contradiction in terms you might think.

The first is a documentary about Syria, For Sama, which won the prize for Best Documentary at Cannes this year (and has garnered a host of other awards, including the Special Jury Prize for International Feature Documentary at the Hot Docs Festival).

Here is G. Allen Johnson in the San Francisco Chronicle – and, given my work on the Assad regime’s systematic attacks on hospitals and medical care you will see why this is so important to me:

The civil war in Syria is horrific, is killing innocent civilians and is an ongoing humanitarian crisis. It could make you lose your faith in humanity, and who could blame any residents there if they did?

And yet, out of the ashes of conflict comes “For Sama,” a remarkable documentary  … about a doctor struggling to care for civilian war casualties in a makeshift hospital in the Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo, his journalist wife who documents it, and their infant daughter.

It is hard-hitting and graphic — some scenes cause you to look away. Yet it’s also loving and warm, a remarkable blend of reporting, cinema verite and essay not to be missed.

Waad Al-Khateab, who sent footage and reports from Aleppo to Channel 4 in London, also shot much personal footage. She and British filmmaker Edward Watts, who is credited with her as director, shaped the footage into the story of her family in the form of an essay. Her narration speaks to her daughter Sama — an explanation of why she and her husband Hamza stayed instead of taking her to safety.

“I need you to understand why your father and I made the choices we did,” Waad says.

The answer is they believe in freedom and humanity. Waad began covering the outbreak of civil war as a student in 2011. Hamza is a doctor who must save every life he can. “This is our path, this is our life,” he tells Waad.

The bulk of the film takes place in 2016, when constant bombing by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad— which include Russian aircraft — turn much of the city into rubble. The dead and wounded number in the thousands.

So there are intense, bloody scenes in the E.R., where lives are lost and saved. Meanwhile, Sama is being raised with the constant sound of exploding bombs. Waad does her best to comfort and raise her.

The family loses their beautiful home in the shelling, and eventually Hamza’s hospital is also destroyed (Assad’s forces specifically targeted places such as hospitals). Hamza and his team locate a building that would not be on Assad’s maps that would be suitable as a makeshift hospital — and home, as they will all live there — buttressed by thousands of sandbags as buffer against bombs.

Teo Bugbee in the New York Times adds:

“For Sama” provides a coherent account of a humanitarian crisis from the perspective of the wounded and displaced.

But just as crucially, and perhaps more compellingly, al-Kateab’s reflexive filmmaking provides an uncannily relatable example of the mundane experience of war. Profound bravery exists alongside profound ordinariness; friends still gather for dinner, they still tell their children bedtime stories, they still have to cook and clean and sleep.

The activists of this film, including al-Kateab herself, don’t speak in the language of philosophers or politicians. Their quotidian aspirations — to build a garden, to send their children safely to school — demonstrate the brutality of the government’s response, but they also invite viewers to picture themselves in the shoes of these modest political dissidents. Unselfconsciously, “For Sama” prompts audience members to ask themselves: How long would you defy tyranny if your world was coming down around you?

You can find a conversation with the film-makers here and (especially) here, and more reviews at the Intercept here and from the great Roger Ebert here.

The second film is Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell’s Gaza:

It’s hard to imagine anybody living a normal life in the Gaza Strip. Frequently labeled as the world’s largest open-air prison, it makes an appearance on news reports every time a confrontation erupts between Israel and Hamas. From TV sets thousands of miles away, this tiny piece of land has been reduced to an image of violence, chaos and destruction. So what do the people do when they’re not under siege?

The Gaza which is seldom seen is ordinary, everyday Gaza, a coastal strip which measures just twenty-five miles by six and which is home to an eclectic mix of almost two million people. Gaza cannot be understood in a purely political context or by analyzing tragic sound bites during conflict. It can only be understood by immersion, by living amongst its people and by recognizing and exploring its rich social diversity and cultural subtleties.

 

GAZA will introduce the audience to the surprising and the unexpected, the unfamiliar stories that portray its true face. It takes an atypical approach to finding out what makes this remarkable place tick as it introduces to the world extraordinary stories of everyday characters leading ordinary lives.

GAZA depicts a people plagued by conflict but not defined by it and as we journey through the physically broken and battered landscape, we let our cast of characters speak for themselves. Through them we gain a nuanced understanding of what life is really like for its citizens and by extension, grow and foster a rare familiarity and affinity with this truly unique place, as we build towards a tender portrait of a beleaguered humanity.

 

More here and here and (especially) here.

I’ve written about siege warfare in an extended series of posts (here, here, here and here). You can find my posts on Gaza by using the GUIDE tab (above), and I really recommend Ron Smith‘s excellent work on siege warfare in Gaza: Healthcare under siege: ‘Geopolitics of medical service provision in the Gaza Strip’, Social science and medicine 146 (2015) 332-40; ‘Isolation through humanitarianism: Subaltern geopolitics of the siege on Gaza’, Antipode 48 (2016) 750-759; ‘Israel’s permanent siege of Gaza’. Middle East Report 290 (2019) here

The Bombing Encyclopedia and military interrogation

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Ever since I first wrote about the US Air Force’s Bombing Encyclopedia of the World (see here, here, and here) I’ve received endless e-mails about the project, but now there is a wonderful article by Elliott Child – ‘Through the wringer: Mass interrogation and United States air force targeting intelligence in the early cold war’ – that goes into extraordinary detail about the back-story.  It’s just appeared on the Political Geography website (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102052).

Here is the abstract:

Mass interrogation systems are recurrent features of US military action. They are technopolitical apparatuses, disclosing their own spatial practices, choreographic repertoires, persistent technical features, and political ef- fects. They are often large-scale, sophisticated arrangements of expertise, technologies, and scriptural processes. Their design features therefore matter. This paper examines how, in the early cold war, mass interrogation was the chief means by which geographical knowledge of the communist world was gathered by the US Air Force. Project Wringer was one of the largest systematic interrogation programmes undertaken during this period, involving over 300 000 subjects, mostly German and Japanese ex-servicemen recently returned from the Soviet Union. Before the advent of systematic aerial reconnaissance, an assemblage of intelligence and interrogation instruments, agencies, and rationalities were was brought together, drawing in human subjects, compiling their knowledge, testimonies, and memories, transforming them into abstract intelligence for broader circulation. It seemed to permit sight in the cold war ‘darkness’ and was critical to production of the Bombing Encyclopedia, an enormous aggregation of industrial, economic, and urban geography. The paper pulls this apparatus apart, focusing on its informational settings and productivist rationalities. By economically recording, disarticulating, layering, and recombining many oral accounts, interrogation materials were pushed through a ‘wringer’ that scrubbed them of subjectivity. Blurry remembered responses became solid, mobile, paper products with objective, cartographic power, a key abstractive process in the development of numerical target codes. The Project Wringer-Bombing Encyclopedia system signals that the spatialising function of military interrogation has been underexamined.

Moe on the Bombing Encyclopedia from Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff here.

And you can find an intriguing, detailed and once classified report on one of the successor projects to Project Wringer, Gregory Pedlow and Donald Weizenback,  The Central Intelligence Agency and overhead reconnaissance: the U2 and Oxcart Programs 1954-1974 here (start with footnote 2!).

Wars in Words

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New books forthcoming from Duke University Press (for my money, one of the most interesting and innovative of university presses – beautifully produced and at accessible prices too: UK publishers please note….)

First, Achille Mbembe‘s keenly awaited Necropolitics (coming in October):

In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of Francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world—a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror, as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side, or what he calls its “nocturnal body,” which is based on the desires, fears, a ects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. is shi has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times, in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered to be enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucault debates on biopolitics, war, and race, as well as Fanon’s notion of care as a shared vulnerability, to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude, but as a person with whom to build a more just world.

Contents:

Introduction. The Ordeal of the World
1. Exit from Democracy
2. The Society of Enmity
3. Necropolitics
4. Viscerality
5. Fanon’s Pharmacy
6. This Stifling Noonday
Conclusion. Ethics of the Passerby

And here’s Judith Butler on the book:

“The appearance of Achille Mbembe’s book, Necropolitics, will change the terms of debate within the English-speaking world. Trenchant in his critique of racism and its relation to the precepts of liberal democracy, Mbembe continues where Foucault left off, tracking the lethal afterlife of sovereign power as it subjects whole populations to what Fanon called ‘the zone of non-being.’ In these pages we find Mbembe not only engaging with biopolitics, the politics of enmity, and the state of exception, but he also opens up the possibility of a global ethic, one that relies less on sovereign power than on the transnational resistance to the spread of the death-world.”

Second, Ronak Kapadia‘s Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (also October):

In Insurgent AestheticsRonak K. Kapadia theorizes the world-making power of contemporary art responses to U.S. militarism in the Greater Middle East. He traces how new forms of remote killing, torture, con nement, and sur- veillance have created a distinctive post-9/11 infrastructure of racialized state violence. Linking these new forms of violence to the history of American imperialism and conquest, Kapadia shows how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists force a reckoning with the U.S. War on Terror’s violent destruction and its impacts on immigrant and refugee communities. Drawing on an eclectic range of visual, installation, and per- formance works, Kapadia reveals queer feminist decolonial critiques of the U.S. security state that visualize subjugated histories of U.S. militarism and make palpable what he terms “the sensorial life of empire.” In this way, these artists forge new aesthetic and social alliances that sustain critical opposition to the global war machine and create alternative ways of knowing and feeling beyond the forever war.

Contents:

Introduction. Sensuous Affiliations: Security, Terror, and the Queer Calculus of the Forever War
1. Up in the Air: US Aerial Power and the Visual Life of Empire in the Drone Age
2. On the Skin: Drone Warfare, Collateral Damage, and the Human Terrain
3. Empire’s Innards: Conjuring “Warm Data” in the Archives of US Global Military Detention
4. Palestine(s) in the Sky: Visionary Aesthetics and Queer Cosmic Utopias from the Frontiers of US Empire
Epilogue. Scaling Empire: Insurgent Aesthetics n the Wilds of Imperial Decline

And here’s Chandan Reddy on the book:

“At its core, Insurgent Aesthetics reminds us that war and security are—despite the modern ideologies that would declare otherwise—fundamentally racialized social practices that seek to manage their violence in everyday life through controlling what can be felt and known. By looking at the ways diasporic communities interfere with sovereign and statist logics that conserve the knowledge of loss for the national community alone, this exquisitely written book powerfully argues for the insurgent abilities of culture to interrupt, deform, and repopulate our felt and known worlds in ways that force a reckoning and connection with the racialized death and detritus that U.S. security at once creates and tries to disappear.”

Next month sees the publication of Leah Zani‘s Bomb Children: Life in the former battlefields of Laos:

Half a century after the CIA’s Secret War in Laos—the largest bombing campaign in history—explosive remnants of war continue to be part of people’s everyday lives. In Bomb Children Leah Zani offers a perceptive analysis of the long-term, often subtle, and unintended effects of massive air warfare. Zani traces the sociocultural impact of cluster submunitions—known in Laos as “bomb children”—through stories of explosives clear- ance technicians and others living and working in these old air strike zones. Zani presents her ethnography alongside poetry written in the field, crafting a startlingly beautiful analysis of state terror, authoritarian revival, rapid development, and ecological contamination. In so doing, she proposes that postwar zones are their own cultural and area studies, offer-ing new ways to understand the parallel relationship between ongoing war violence and postwar revival.

You can read the devastating, exquisitely compelling introduction (pdf) here.

Here’s Ann Laura Stoler on the book:

“Bomb Children is a riveting and reflexive account of war remains, military waste, and ‘development’ in contemporary Laos. As a document it bears/bares the hazardous conditions of its making, poised on the edge of blasts in the margins of safety zones that are never safe, in the collision and convergence between social ecologies riddled with minefields, and between remains and (economic) revival. Tacking between these ‘paired conceptual frames’ and a set of parallelisms that collapse war and peace and life and death, Bomb Children labors in an ethnographic mode that eschews the pornography of detailing mutilated bodies and instead looks to the war damages that are not over and that remain viscerally present in the everyday of people’s lives.”

Also in August, Jairus Victor Grove‘s Savage Ecology War and Geopolitics at the End of the World:

Jairus Victor Grove contends that we live in a world made by war. In Savage Ecology he offers an ecological theory of geopolitics that argues that contemporary global crises are better understood when considered within the larger history of international politics. Infusing international relations with the theoretical interventions of fields ranging from new materialism to political theory, Grove shows how political violence is the principal force behind climate change, mass extinction, slavery, genocide, extractive capitalism, and other catastrophes. Grove analyzes a variety of subjects—from improvised explosive devices and drones to artificial intelligence and brain science—to outline how geopolitics is the violent pursuit of a way of living that comes at the expense of others. Pointing out that much of the damage being done to the earth and its inhabitants stems from colonialism, Grove suggests that the Anthropocene may be better described by the term Eurocene. The key to changing the planet’s trajectory, Grove proposes, begins by acknowledging both the earth-shaping force of geopolitical violence and the demands apocalypses make for fashioning new ways of living.

You can read the introduction (pdf) here, and here is the Table of Contents:

Aphorisms for a New Realism

Part I. The Great Homogenization
1. The Anthropocene as a Geopolitical Fact
2. War as a Form of Life
3. From Exhaustion to Annihilation: A Martial Ecology of the Eurocene
Part II. Operational Spaces
4. Bombs: An Insurgency of Things
5. Blood: Vital Logistics
6. Brains: We Are Not Who We Are
7. Three Images of Transformation as Homogenization
Part III. Must We Persist to Continue?
8. Apocalypse as a Theory of Change
9. Freaks or the Incipience of Other Forms of Life
Conclusion. Ratio feritas: From Critical Responsiveness to Making New Forms of Life
The End: Visions of Los Angeles, California, 2061

Here’s James Der Derian on the book:

“What Beck did for risk society, Hardt and Negri for empire, and Barad for technoscience, Jairus Victor Grove does brilliantly for global violence, delivering an ecology of warfare that is not only a corrosive critique of the three horsemen of our now daily apocalypse—geopolitics, biopolitics, and cybernetics—but a creative strategy for sustaining life now and thereafter. Grove is a philosopher with a hammer, writer with a stiletto, and artist with a spray can.”

Finally, we have to wait until December for a mammoth reader on Militarization, edited by Roberto J. González, Hugh Gusterson and Gustaaf Houtman.  No word on the contents just yet.

The aesthetics of drone warfare

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A conference at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield (UK), 7-8 February 2020, organised by Beryl Pong – Vice Chancellor’s Fellow in English at the University of Sheffield – as part of a wider project funded by a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award for 2019-2020:

Drones have now become commercial and readily available, with innovators promising unprecedented solutions to sectors as wide ranging as agriculture, energy, public safety, and construction. But this multi-billion-dollar industry is founded upon the technology’s origins in a military context, and drone warfare is rapidly redefining the meaning of war, peace, and their temporal and geographical boundaries. Combining surveillance with targeting, satellite imaging with ground-level intelligence, human observation with algorithmic apparatuses, drones have catalysed new ways of making and experiencing war. This international two-day conference explores the issues surrounding drone warfare through the prism of aesthetics: aesthetics understood as art, and as the relationship between the body, the self, and the material environment. How does drone warfare extend and augment the human sensorium? How have writers and artists engaged in new forms or genres to address drone warfare? What is the role of the human in future war? What opportunities and challenges does information-based warfare pose for human rights and peace work? Approaches from all fields are welcome, including literature, history, geography, philosophy, political science, and visual art.

Proposals are invited for 20-minute presentations or for three-paper panels. Topics could include but are not restricted to the following:

Literature and the arts which thematise or feature drone technology and drone warfare
The history and pre-histories of drone warfare, such as aerial bombardment
The relationship between war, technological innovation, and the entertainment industries
Narratives of robotics, artificial intelligence, and information-based warfare
The relationship between peace, surveillance, pre-emption, and human rights
Drones, drone warfare, and social media
Posthuman warfare

Please send 250-word individual paper proposals, or 350-word proposals for fully formed panels, along with short biographies, to Beryl Pong at artofdronewarfare@gmail.com

Note:  There will be a workshop, for postgraduates and early-career researchers, led by Drone Wars UK: an NGO that conducts research, and maintains an up-to-date public dataset, on the U.K. use of armed drones. If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please indicate this in your application.

You can find more about Beryl’s project, and the conference, here.  Conference keynotes from Debjani Ganguly, Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia, and me.