Playing with the future: social irrealism and the politics of aesthetics

In this article we wish to explore the political possibilities of video games. Numerous scholars now take seriously the place of popular culture in the remaking of our geographies, but video games still lag behind. For us, this tendency reflects a general response to them as imaginary spaces that are separate from everyday life and ‘real’ politics. It is this disconnect between abstraction and lived experience that we complicate by defining play as an event of what Brian Massumi calls lived abstraction. We wish to short-circuit the barriers that prevent the aesthetic resonating with the political and argue that through their enactment, video games can animate fantastical futures that require the player to make, and reflect upon, profound ethical decisions that can be antagonistic to prevailing political imaginations. We refer to this as social irrealism to demonstrate that reality can be understood through the impossible and the imagined.     

Long wars and long telegrams: containing Al-Qaeda

Can history help the ‘war on terror’? It is a cliché that 9/11 changed the world. But the idea that the war is exceptional lacks historical perspective. Assuming a radically new threat, the Bush administration proclaimed a theology rather than a coherent strategy. It articulated the ‘war on terror’ as a utopian and unbounded quest for absolute security. It did not effectively measure costs against risks or orchestrate ends, ways and means. This led the United States into exhausting wars of attrition. A more careful dialogue with the past can address this. Containment, America's core idea during the Cold War, supplies a logic that can inform a prudent strategy. Like Soviet communism with its fatal self‐contradictions, Al‐Qaeda and its terror network is ultimately self‐destructive without major military operations. America and its allies can contain it with more limited measures in the long term as it destroys itself. The US should show restraint, doing nothing to hinder the growing Islamic revolt against Al‐Qaeda. In other words, fight small and wait.     

Safe Places in Domestic Spaces: Two-Year-Olds at Play in their Homes

This paper contributes to the growing research literature on children's ‘intimate geographies’ by focusing on two-year-old children's explorations and play within the domestic spaces of their homes. It draws on video data showing three young girls playing in selected home spaces i.e. a family grocery shop in Peru, the upstairs rooms of a house in America, and the balcony of an apartment in Italy. Through analysis of short video sequences the paper describes the way children use and invest meaning in these spaces. It is argued that the three domestic locations can be seen as ‘safe places’, in both material and personal senses; and that they enable children's sense of belonging, foster their ‘emplaced knowledge’ and build on their confidence to explore spaces further afield.     

Geographies of children’s play in the context of neoliberal restructuring in Istanbul*

This research analyzes the material and discursive transformations of children’s play in the urban context of socio-economic transformations brought about by neoliberal restructuring in Istanbul. Two new private play centers called ‘children’s cities’ and one public playground are investigated by using observation, semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The findings of discourse analysis suggest that processes of privatization, exclusion and securitization underlying the city space deeply structure the new geographies of play. The hegemonic presence of private spaces is reinforced with the municipal neglect of public play spaces and also with particular framing of ‘good play’ as exclusive, secure and instrumental. The important conclusion is that neither the children’s cities nor the public playground observed in this study can fully meet the benchmarks of ‘the right to play’ that encompasses play that is free of charge and play as a right in itself rather than as instrumental for other developmental goals.     

The desert of the real and the simulacrum of war

As the global war on terror bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new inter‐and intra‐service struggle emerged within the military, between what we might call the ‘transformationists’ and the ‘neotraditionalists’. The transformationists put their faith in network‐centric warfare and precision munitions to resolve the intractable political, civil and religious conflicts of the twenty‐first century. The neotraditionalists, in contrast, go back to the future for lessons, to the ‘low‐intensity conflicts’ of Malaya and Vietnam, the ‘small wars’ that Marines fought in Central America in the interwar period, and even the instructions given to American servicemen deployed to assist the British occupation of Iraq during the Second World War. Lumped together under the rubric of ‘irregular warfare’, two new watchwords have had emerged from the neotraditionalist camp: ‘counter‐insurgency’ and ‘cultural awareness’. As the neotraditionalists reach out to social scientists to assist them in their efforts, a secondary civil war has erupted in the universities over whether academics should become involved in the new war efforts. Based on a week spent embedded with the 1/25th Marines at 29 Palms and extensive interviews with key proponents and critics, this article maps (and reflexively questions the practice of mapping) the future of warfare as it is planned, taught, gamed and operationalized by the US military.     

From terrorism to dispossession: Pakistan's Anti‐Terrorism Act as a means of eviction

The discourse of the ‘war on terror’ fails to address the complex and multifaceted structural violence of landlessness, food insecurity and environmental degradation that afflicts the world. Pakistan, for instance, has been a subject of great discussion and geopolitical analysis as the ground zero in the war against terror. However, the scholarship on terrorism in Pakistan analyzes militant and jihadi groups as discrete agents of primordial conflicts, spy agencies and sectarian rivalries with little analysis of the history of the cold war and the effects of the Afghan war. In this article, the author analyzes how the global ‘war on terror’ has proliferated into seemingly unrelated domains of life, and specifically how anti‐terror security legislation has pulled the rug out from under the most successful peasant land rights movement in Pakistan.     

The desert,the border,and the city: Staging a spectacle on the Chile-Peru border

The 1970s saw Chile and Peru, both headed by military dictators, come to the brink of war. In order to avoid such a war, the Chilean military in the far north engaged in techniques of ‘spectacle’ for two reasons: firstly, to convince citizens on both sides of the border that Chile had a strong military and would succeed in the event of a war with Peru, and secondly, to create the impression of ‘fraternity’ with Peru. To perform these spectacles, the Chilean military employed the geography of northern Chile in three spaces: the desert, the border, and the city. These spaces became stages where acts of military deception could be implemented with the Chileans using fake tanks, military ceremonies, and bogus parades to appear militarily strong. This extends current scholarship by arguing that multiple environments can be harnessed for their specific geographical qualities in order to stage a unified geopolitical spectacle. Previous geographical scholarship has focused on individual environments as military spaces and scholarship on spectacle has treated environments as a backdrop and not a central part of how the spectacle is enacted. Here I show that it was the precise natures of the border, the desert, and the city that were exploited for a multi-scaled, heterogeneous, and fractured form of spectacle. Through the orchestrated control of these three spaces that define the border region, a clear narrative of military strength matched with a desire for peaceful co-operation with Peru was created.     

The coming revolution in foreign affairs: rethinking American national security

For the last two decades the US has pursued what some analysts have called the ‘fantastical idea’ of military transformation that would enable the US to change the very nature of war. Known as the ‘revolution in military affairs’, this process would use technology to provide the US with battlefield dominance that no opponent could overcome. Motivated by the politics of the Cold War, however, this exit from reality has proved less than effective in what has become known as the ‘war on terror’. The US has been pulled into nasty, ‘small’ wars, against enemies utilizing asymmetric tactics. The Bush administration has tried to destroy these groups through the use of military force, failing, or even worse refusing, to recognize that these enemies feed off the economical, political and social rot of weak and failing states. For the last eight years the US government has addressed the symptoms of a problem rather than the actual disease. If America wants to make serious progress with the most pressing national security risks, the next American president must enact a revolution in foreign affairs that sees a massive overhaul and substantial investment in the State Department and USAID. A critical mass of research exists to illustrate the links between development and security—it is time Washington gets serious and embraces a conception of security that is more holistic, and ultimately, more effective.     

“Peace is Our Only Shelter”: Questioning Domesticities of Militarization and White Privilege

Abstract: This paper traces how Los Angeles peace activists tried to make visible the grave domestic effects of Cold War militarization. Women Strike for Peace went beyond a focus on the productive relations between the state, military and industry captured by the term “military–industrial complex” to analyze how reproductive spaces were part of this complex. In opposing war, they challenged what I am calling militarized domesticities: how war‐making shapes the ‘home front’ and home as the spaces national security states claim to protect. I build on feminist antiracist intersectionality theories to situate the military–industrial complex per se within broader processes of the militarization of society and daily life. The questions become how do gendered processes of militarization—that work in conjunction with relations of white privilege—produce and connect differently situated “private” spaces or home places? How might strategies for dismantling the military–industrial complex emerge from the contradictions of these processes?     

The Contribution of Reinhold Niebuhr's ‘Moral Ambiguity’ to Contemporary Discussions on the Morality of Intervention and the Use of Force in a Post-Cold War World

Abstract

The post-Cold War world poses challenges to traditional principles guiding the ethics of the use of force. Military intervention and the current war on terror are two phenomena that challenge just war criteria such as just cause, right authority, and reasonable hope for success. The just war tradition is helpful but needs to be expanded and re-thought to address the pressing issues of our time. This paper suggests Reinhold Niebuhr's category of ‘moral ambiguity’ as a contribution to the discussion. His application of moral ambiguity to his situation during World War II and the Cold War witnesses to the depth that such a category can add to current international circumstances fraught with moral complexity. Though it too requires critique, contemporary discussions on military intervention reflect many of Niebuhr's evaluations of the ambiguity in the use of force as different global actors seek humane alternatives to provide relief to intense human suffering.     

The ‘new home front’ and the war on terror: ethical and political reframing of national and international politics

This article adopts the notion of the ‘new home front’ to consider the spatial complexity of the war on terror and the blurring of domestic and foreign policy divides. It considers the politics and ethics of the war in three main areas: new media and everyday life; liberalism under strain; and citizens’ lives, multiculturalism and gender. It discusses the increasing role of horizontal (bottom up) influences alongside vertical (top down) ones, not least in the context of new media, which adds the sociospatial (virtual) realm of online communications to the familiar geospatial (physical) world of politics. Implications of the extended nature of the war on terror are assessed, as well as the potential for developments that have been part of it to impact on the broader sphere of liberal international politics in the future.     

The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the ‘war on terror’

After two decades of scholarship on ‘critical geopolitics’, the question of whether it is largely a discursive critique of prevailing knowledge production and geopolitical texts or critique with an implicit, normative politics of its own remains open. These positions are not incommensurate, and much scholarship on critical geopolitics does both. This paper analyzes critical geopoliticians' concern with this question in the present historical moment and probes the possibility of a post-foundational ethic as the basis for ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics and beyond. Empirically, this paper explores these theoretical tensions within ‘critical geopolitics’ by tracing the disparate fates of two young men, both child soldiers at the time of their capture. ‘Child soldier’ is an unstable category subject to geopolitical valence and stigma during the ‘war on terror’. The deployment of extra-legal tactics and spaces of violence, such as those faced by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, point to the rise of biopolitics combined with geopolitics, illustrating the intersection of sovereignty and governmentality as important political fodder for critical geopolitics two decades after its inception. The stories of Canadian Omar Khadr, one of the youngest prisoners at Guantanamo and the only citizen of a Western state still held there, and Ismael Beah, a rehabilitated soldier who fought as a boy from Sierra Leone, illustrate too how geographical imagination strongly shapes access to provisions of international law and the victimized status of ‘child soldier’ in particular.     

Moral Spaces and Sexual Transgression: Understanding Rape in War and Post Conflict

When it comes to rape in war, evocative language describing rape as a ‘weapon of war’ has become commonplace. Although politically important, overemphasis on strategic aspects of wartime sexual violence can be misleading. Alternative explanations tend to understand rape either as exceptional — a departure from ‘normal’ sexual relationships — or as part of a continuum of gendered violence. This article shows how, even in war, norms are not suspended; nor do they simply continue. War changes the moral landscape. Drawing on ethnographic research over 10 years in northern Uganda, this article argues for a re‐sexualization of understandings of rape. It posits that sexual mores are central to explaining sexual violence, and that sexual norms — and hence transgressions — vary depending on the moral spaces in which they occur. In Acholi, moral spaces have temporal dimensions (‘olden times’, the ‘time of fighting’ and ‘these days’) and associated spatial dimensions (home, camp, bush, village, town). The dynamics of each help to explain the occurrence of some forms of sexual violence and the rarity of others. By reflecting on sexual norms and transgressions in these moral spaces, the article sheds light on the relationship between ‘event’ and ‘ordinary’, rape and war.     

Producing the military urban(s): Interoperability,space-making,and epistemic distinctions between military services in urban operations

Urban wars represent one – perhaps the – phenomenon in which war and cities take particular form in and through each other. With the epistemics of this reciprocal relationship being less studied, this article brings together the discourses on urban war and military interoperability respectively. Both discourses emphasise the question of knowledge. A shared geographic knowledge held by the service branches involved in a joint operation is considered key for interoperability to arise. In the urban wars discourse, the need and difficulty of ‘knowing’ the urban are stressed. However, we know less about whether military services involved in a joint urban operation produce distinct geographic knowledges and, if so, with what effects. With inspiration from critical scholarship on military geographies and from works on the history and geography of knowledge, this article develops a conceptual framework to target the mutually constitutive relationship between military epistemics and urban space in urban war. In it, I make a twofold argument, illustrated with the help of empirical examples from two Israeli joint urban military operations. First, the type of geographic knowledge that military ground and air forces produce as they seek to ‘make known’ particular urban spaces differs due to the services' distinct situatedness and relative distance to the urban environment. The produced types of military geographic knowledge, moreover, do not imply different perspectives on the urban as a pre-existing entity as much as they bring – in distinct fashions – the urban into being.     

Travelling in your backyard: the unfamiliar places of parenting

Current theoretical understandings of family-as-activity, as suggested by the terms ‘doing family’ or ‘families we choose’, locate family practices such as parenting, within the realm of the spatial. Feminist geography particularly has been instrumental in conceptualisations of parenting as a spatial project that involves constant renegotiation of the ‘everyday’ spaces of home, work and play. However, what are less evident in the literature are the specificities of the actual places and spaces of parenting: where parents go in the course of their parenting or how they actually use particular spaces. Furthermore, most scholarly work on parenting has been based on the theoretical and material experience of heterosexual parents, with the experiences of non-heterosexual parented families under-documented. Using data from a recent study with lesbian parents, this paper seeks to address some of these conceptual and empirical gaps, suggesting that an exploration of the everyday spatialities of same-sex parenting contributes, not only to expanding current geographic understandings of family and parenting, but also understanding of the material places where these identities—familial, parental, sexual—intersect.     

Who speaks for Islam?: ‘authenticity’ and the interpretation of Islamic law in America's war on terror

Recognising that America's response to the events of 11 September would do well to maintain a sharp distinction between the ‘war on terror’ and a war ‘against Islam’, this article argues that American diplomatic rhetoric would benefit from an explicit effort to engage ‘frameworks of legitimacy’ within Islam, including the terms of Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic legal debate. The article examines the merits of such an approach in the context of several recent diplomatic dilemmas, including the Jyllens-Posten cartoon controversy. It concludes with an assessment of the American (domestic) political environment within which this approach tends to encounter its most ardent critics.     

Biometric borders: Governing mobilities in the war on terror

This article proposes the concept of the biometric border in order to signal a dual-faced phenomenon in the contemporary war on terror: the turn to scientific technologies and managerial expertise in the politics of border management; and the exercise of biopower such that the bodies of migrants and travellers themselves become sites of multiple encoded boundaries. Drawing on the US VISIT programme of border controls (United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology), the article proposes three central themes of the politics of the biometric border. First, the use of risk profiling as a means of governing mobility within the war on terror, segregating ‘legitimate’ mobilities such as leisure and business, from ‘illegitimate’ mobilities such as terrorism and illegal immigration. Second, the representation of biometrics and the body, such that identity is assumed to be anchored as a source of prediction and prevention. Finally, the techniques of authorization that allow the surveillance of mobility to be practiced by private security firms and homeland security citizens alike. Throughout the article, I argue that, though the biometric border is becoming an almost ubiquitous frontier in the war on terror, it also contains ambivalent, antagonistic and undecidable moments that make it contestable.     

Grasslands as transitional spaces of play: Mongol children’s reimagination of the world in cinematic representation

ABSTRACT

This article examines children’s geographies in cinematic representation. It argues that cinematic landscape that intimates what D. W. Winnicott conceives as ‘transitional space’ contributes to a cinematic rendering of the otherness of childhood. Taking the Chinese movie Mongolian Ping-Pong (2005, dir. Ning Hao) as a case study, this article illustrates how the cinematic space of the grasslands is transformed into multiple transitional spaces of play for the Mongol child protagonists owing to the filmmaker’s employment of cinematic landscape, while a ping-pong ball discovered by one of the children becomes their ‘transitional object’. In transitional spaces, the children safely and creatively manipulate cultural resources of diverse scales to understand the social-cultural identity of the ball. Consequently, their unique vision of the world unfolds. The filmmaker’s cinematic treatment reveals his celebration of the children’s creativity. He sympathises that they cannot escape from acculturation once they start formal schooling in a Han-dominated society.     

Going to war democratically: lessons for Australia from Canada and the UK

This article addresses the role of democracy in Australia’s foreign policy formation. It argues that public debate and deliberation on foreign policy is a normative good. When there is a lack of debate on a government decision, a democratic deficit occurs. Such a deficit is evident in the way Australia goes to war; however, the examples of Canada and the UK show that reforming parliamentary practice is possible. In the context of the ‘war on terror’, this article compares Australia, Canada, and the UK from 2001 to 2015 with regards to ‘war powers’. Drawing from debates recorded in Hansard, it finds that while Canada and the UK took steps to ‘parliamentarise’ their foreign policy formation, the war-powers prerogative of the Australian government remained absolute. It concludes that increasing the role of parliament may go a long way towards democratising the decision of when Australia goes to war. This has practical as well as normative benefits, since it may prevent governments from entering wars that are unsupported by the public. At minimum, it will compel governments to engage more thoroughly in public debate about their proposed policies, and justify their decisions to the nation.     

Be Part of the Story: A popular geopolitics of war comics aesthetics and Royal Air Force recruitment

This paper provides an analysis of images associated with the British Royal Air Force's recent ‘Be Part of the Story’ war comic-styled military recruiting campaign. Set around literatures in popular geopolitics, the paper builds on the concept of comic book visualities to suggest that the ‘Be Part of the Story’ images reproduce longstanding war comics conventions, and coherently represent the complex, relational and spatially disparate battlespaces of the present. The paper, firstly, provides a detailed history of war comics as they have mediated war to publics, and argues that war comics should figure more strongly in future studies of popular geopolitics. Secondly, it argues that more than simply part of a pervasive ‘cultural condition’ of militarization, military recruitment is a vital medium through which states and militaries view, and choose to represent their role in the world. Lastly, it demonstrates that ‘Be Part of the Story’ reproduces the violent visions, metaphors and cultural designations integral to state-centric narratives of global politics, and specifically, spatial principles inherent to network-centric warfare.