Over at The Disorder of Things Charmaine Chua introduces a lively podcast in which she discusses Logistics – violence, empire and resistance with Deb Cowen and Laleh Khalili.
Together, we take a look at the increasing ubiquity and prominence of logistics as a mode for organizing social and spatial life. We discuss how this seemingly banal concern with the movement of goods is actually foundational to contemporary global capitalism and imperialism, reshaping patterns of inequality, undermining labor power, and transforming strategies of governance. We also ask: what might a counter-logistical project look like? What role does logistics play in anti-colonial and anti-capitalist struggles across the globe?
On her own blog, The Gamming, Laleh links to lecture she gave at Georgetown on ‘The Logistics of Counterinsurgency’:
It is a banal cliche of military thinking that the deployment of coercive forces to the battlefields requires a substantial commitment in logistical support for the transport of goods, materiel, and personnel to the war-zone, the maintenance of forces there, and their eventual withdrawal from there. In counterinsurgency warfare, which is predicated on the deployment of large numbers of forces, persuasion or coercion of civilian populations into supporting the counterinsurgent force, and the transformation of the civilian milieu as much as the military space, this logistical function becomes even more crucial. In this talk I will be thinking through the ways in which the making of logistical infrastructures – roads, ports, warehouses, and transport – has been crucial to the wars the US has waged since 2001 in Southwest Asia, and how these infrastructures in turn transform the social, political, and economic lives of the region they leave behind.
It’s a wonderfully wide-ranging survey (Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, Vietnam, Morocco and more), and it’s also a richly illustrated and immensely thoughtful performance.
In addition, Laleh’s lecture provides a brilliant context for my limited incursions into logistics in Afghanistan (here, here and here), an arena which I am now revisiting to understand both the supply of medical matériel and the evacuation of casualties.
geographical imaginations 