Wall Exchange | geographical imaginations

I am thrilled to announce our next Wall Exchange at the Vogue Theatre (Granville Street) in downtown Vancouver at 7 p.m. on Tuesday 7 November: Andrew Feinstein on ‘The shadow world of the global arms trade’. One of my earliest posts was about what I called The death merchants, and I drew attention to Andrew’s wonderful work there. So it will be a real treat to hear him live:

In this Wall Exchange lecture Andrew Feinstein draws back the curtain on the shadow world of the global trade in weapons—its systemic corruption, highly technical nature, and the pervasive secrecy in which deals are concluded.

Feinstein will propose mechanisms to clean up and properly regulate the global arms trade. In addition to the death and destruction caused by its products and the massive costs of the world’s defense spending, the lack of properly enforced regulation and control makes the occurrence of unintended consequences inevitable. This results in the very weapons sold by many Western governments being used against their own citizens. Nowhere is this more evident than in the so-called ‘War on Terror’, in which suspect intelligence and fluctuating alliances with non-state groups and countries such as Saudi Arabia undermine our security.

Andrew Feinstein is Executive Director of Corruption Watch, an NGO that details and exposes the impact of bribery and corruption on democracy, governance and development. Andrew was named amongst the 100 most influential people in the world working in armed violence reduction. Along with two colleagues, he was voted South Africa’s anti-corruption hero of 2014.

His critically-acclaimed book The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade reveals the corruption and malfeasance at the heart of the global arms business, both formal and illicit. A documentary feature film of the book premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in April 2016, and was awarded Best Documentary Feature at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Valladolid International Film Festival and the Belgian Ensor Award.

Andrew was an ANC Member of Parliament in South Africa for over seven years where he served under Nelson Mandela. He resigned in 2001 in protest at the ANC’s refusal to countenance an independent and comprehensive enquiry into a multi-billion dollar arms deal which was tainted by allegations of high level corruption.

You can read much more about the presentation here, where you can also watch a trailer for Andrew’s award-winning documentary Shadow World (which will be on PBS on 20 November 2017).

The event is free, but you need to register in advance: online here or via Ticketfly on 1-888-732-1682

“When war happens in the city, people die in buildings, the majority in their homes; when the dust settles ruins become evidence with which we could reconstruct controversial events.”
Eyal Weizman

I’m delighted to announce that my good friend Eyal Weizman will deliver the next Wall Exchange on Forensic Architecture at the Vogue Theatre in downtown Vancouver on 15 October 2015:

Can architecture provide new tool of political analysis and intervention? This question is central to the work of Eyal Weizman, Israeli architect and scholar. Since 2010 he has been directing Forensic Architecture, an innovative forensic agency that investigates the sites of contemporary conflicts and monitors the crimes of states. His teams examine buildings, ruins, maps, satellite imagery and increasingly an emergent type of testimony — images and clips taken by citizens and uploaded online. His talk will unpack new modes of exposing the logic behind state violence from the frontier regions of Pakistan, through the forests of south America to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

I’ve noted the work of Forensic Architecture many times – see here and here, for example, and our Acting Director Gastón Gordillo‘s excellent review essay on Forensis [introduction available here; full version appeared in Environment & Planning D: Society and Space 33 (2) (2015) 382 – 388 and is available here] – so if you are (or can be) in Vancouver in the fall, do come along.

Like all Wall Exchanges, the lecture is sponsored by UBC’s Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and is free and open to the public – though you do need to book in advance. Full details and a link to book will be available on the PWIAS website from 8 September onwards.