As the blog has grown, so it’s become increasingly difficult for readers to navigate through the different themes – and so this is a rough guide to some of the key posts which will, I hope, supplement a judicious use of the search box and the publications available under the DOWNLOADS tab. Please bear in mind that the lists on this page do not include every post I’ve written on a particular theme, so you should continue to use the search box (and the links embedded in the posts) for more information.
(1) Casualty evacuation and medical care in war zones
(a) On the Western Front in the First World War:
(b) On Afghanistan:
The geographies of sixty minutes (on the ‘Golden Hour’ and geographies of trauma care)
The prosthetics of military violence
See also (5) below on Harry Parker‘s Anatomy of a soldier
(c) On PTSD:
(2) The Death of the Clinic: spaces of exception and violations of medical neutrality
(a) For historical background on (i) Henry Dunant, the Red Cross and the Battle of Solferino, and (ii) on the Lieber Code and the American Civil War:
(b) On medical neutrality in general, see Medical neutrality and modern war; see also War and therapeutic geographies
(c) Hospital raids in the First World War (Etaples):
(d) The US attack on the MSF Trauma Centre, Kunduz (2015):
(e) Attacks on hospitals and doctors in Syria:
Closely related, a series of posts on siege warfare in Syria:
Mass Murder in Slow Motion (I): East Ghouta
Mass Murder in Slow Motion (II): Siege Economies
Gas masques (on the chemical attacks on Douma in April 2018 and the response)
Mass Murder in Slow Motion (III): Military and Paramilitary Violence
(f) Attacks on medical infrastructure in Gaza:
Note: You can find a (different) discussion of killing fields as spaces of exception – another reworking of Giorgio Agamben‘s original conception – in ‘Dirty Dancing’ (DOWNLOADS tab) and in my posts on targeted killing in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan here, here and here (see also (4) below).
On Gaza as a space of exception:
For a discussion that follows Agamben (into Auschwitz) on the camp as a space of exception:
The camp and geographical imaginations
(3) Fighting Ebola
West Point and the war on Ebola
(4) Aerial violence and drone warfare
(a) My two Tanner Lectures on geographies and genealogies of bombing (under the title ‘Reach from the skies’: ‘Good Bomb, Bad Bomb’ and ‘Killing Space’) are available under the AUDIO/VIDEO tab; a summary with many of the slides can be found here:
See also:
The machinery of (writing about) bombing
(b) The Wright Brothers were convinced that the primary use for military aircraft would be reconnaissance – but in the run-up to the First World War others organised ‘bombing competitions’ to persuade audiences (and armies) otherwise. For an illustrated account of those early histories (including the first bombs dropped from an aircraft):
Episodes in the history of bombing
On bombing Paris:
(c) On bombing in the Second World War (and after), see my ‘Doors into nowhere’ and ‘Lines of descent’ (DOWNLOADS tab) and:
Of bombs and men (on John Steinbeck and Bombs Away!)
Cologne and the geometry of destruction
Bombing the USA (on Strategic Air Command’s nuclear strike rehearsals against US cities).
(d) On the post-war Bombing Encyclopedia (and the process of targeting) see:
Bombing Encyclopedia of the World
(e) The history of military drones:
The conventional history of military drones has been extensively covered, but there’s virtually nothing on the remarkable intersections between drones and nuclear weapons; if that intrigues you, see Little boys and blue skies and Drones and atomic clouds (derived from a presentation soon to be converted into an extended essay) and, more recently, Drones and atomic bombs.
You can find other genealogies in my ‘Lines of descent’ and ‘Moving targets and violent geographies’ (DOWNLOADS tab); see also Predatory networks.
(f) Theory of the drone
For links to my 12 extended commentaries on Grégoire Chamayou‘s Théorie du drone: Theories and counter-theories of the drone
On Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer‘s critique of Chamayou: Ideology of the drone
(g) Drones and airstrikes
On a drone-mediated air strike in Uruzgan (Afghanistan) on 21 February 2010 – the classic strike that virtually all extended commentaries on drone warfare hit upon – see Angry Eyes (1) and Angry Eyes (2); and don’t miss the screenshots from the reconstruction of the attack in Sonia Kennebeck’s National Bird. For further discussion of the strike see Landscapes of interference, while Meatspace? provides a supplementary analysis of the corporeality of the strike and, crucially, its aftermath.
For a detailed analysis of an airstrike on two hijacked tankers near Kunduz – that resulted in dozens of civilian casualties – see Kunduz and ‘seeing like a military’; the questions raised there about militarised vision intersect with those detailed in ‘Angry Eyes’ (above), on which see also Predator View.
On Eyes in the Sky, see here.
On drone strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, see ‘Dirty Dancing’ (DOWNLOADS tab) and
Dirty dancing and spaces of exception in Pakistan
The scene of the crime: customary law and forensic architecture
(h) More general notes on targeted killing, drone warfare and geospatial intelligence/surveillance:
Digital capture and physical kill
Drones, battlefields and later modern war
Targeted killings and signature strikes
(i) And on the dialectic of distance and intimacy in drone strikes:
(5) Corpography, the body and military violence
(a) These ideas developed in concert with my essays on ‘Gabriel’s map’ and ‘The natures of war’ (see DOWNLOADS tab):
‘Stop, hey, what’s that sound?’
Atomic soldiers and the nuclear battlefield
Meatspace? (This essay explores the embodied nature of aerial violence)
(b) My readings of Harry Parker‘s Anatomy of a Soldier (and related texts):
Object lessons (and see the presentation with the same title under the DOWNLOADS tab)
And for an attempt to work with those ideas on the Western front in the First World War:
These readings intersect with my work on Casualty evacuation and medical care in war zones [(1) above]
(6) The natures of war
(a) These posts are illustrated versions of key sections from ‘The natures of war’ (DOWNLOADS tab):
(b) For more on militarised nature, see:
(7) Terrorism and counter-terrorism
On the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, January 2015:
Je ne suis pas Charlie [This is in English!]
Paris and Beirut, November 2015:
Nice, July 2016:
#Portes Ouvertes [This is in English too]
(8) International law and legal geographies
Legal geographies and the assault on international law
(9) Other
On airstrikes and civilian casualties in Iraq:
On how watches were synchronised on the Western Front:
Homogeneous war time (with apologies to Walter Benjamin)
geographical imaginations 