Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence

402 Pages·2006·9.98 MB·English

by  Derek Gregory

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Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data
Violent geographies : fear, terror, and political violence / edited by Derek Gregory and Allan Pred.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0‑415‑95146‑1 (hardback : alk. paper) ‑‑ ISBN 0‑415‑95147‑X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Political
violence. 2. Ethnic conflict. 3. Terrorism. 4. War on Terrorism, 2001‑ I. Gregory, Derek, 1951‑ II.
Pred, Allan Richard, 1936‑ III. Title.
JC328.6.V58 2006
303.6‑‑dc22 2006014049
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Contents
1 Introduction 1
Derek Gregory and Allan Pred
2 Bare Life, Political Violence, and the Territorial Structure of Britain
and Ireland 7
Gerry Kearns
3 “An Unrecognizable Condition Has Arried” 37
Anna J. Secor
4 Cosmopolitanism’s Collateral Damage 55
Eric N. Olund
5 Refuge or Refusal 77
Jennifer Hyndman and Alison Mountz
6 Imperialism Imposed and Inited 93
Jim Glassman
7 Spaces of Terror and Fear on Colombia’s Pacific Coast 111
Ulrich Oslender
8 Fatal Transactions 133
Philippe Le Billon
9 The Geography of Hindu Right-Wing Violence in India 153
Rupal Oza
10 Reolutionary Islam 175
Michael Watts
11 Vanishing Points 205
Derek Gregory
12 Groom Lake and the Imperial Production of Nowhere 237
Trevor Paglen
13 Targeting the Inner Landscape 255
Matthew Farish
14 Immaculate Warfare? The Spatial Politics of Extreme Violence 273
Nigel Thrift

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i Violent Geographies
15 The Pentagon’s New Imperial Cartography 295
Simon Dalby
16 Demodernizing by Design 309
Stephen Graham
17 The Terror City Hypothesis 329
Mitchell Gray and Elvin Wyly
18 Banal Terrorism 349
Cindi Katz
19 Situated Ignorance and State Terrorism 363
Allan Pred
Contributors 385
Index 387
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Introduction
Derek Gregory and Allan Pred
Political violence takes many forms, and in this collection we have all tried to
respond to its contemporary versions in different ways. As a group, we work with
different theories, we analyze different materials, and we write in different voices, so
this is not a manifesto. Neither is it a gazetteer, because no single volume (not even
a library) could encompass the violence that animates our world. Some of the places
and events we write about will be familiar; others will not; and many more, including
some that haunt the headlines every day, are absent. But our aim is neither to provide
some grand theory of political violence nor a comprehensive rendering of its varied
instances and implications. This is simply a collective attempt to work through some
of the ways in which a critical geographical imagination can illuminate the spaces
through which terror, fear, and political violence are abroad in the world. Here we
want to draw out a number of themes that run through the collection.
The immediate provocation for our project was a twin series of responses to the
murderous events of 9/11. On one side, there were those who reduced the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to a barbarism that passed all understand-
ing. Any attempt at explanation was vilified as exoneration. Terrorism was located
beyond the boundaries of civilization and lodged in the pathologies of those who ham-
mered so destructively at its gates. The cry was soon taken up by others, who dismissed
any opposition to the sovereign powers of the security state as “terrorism,” and who
enlisted the rhetoric of the “war on terror” as a means of legitimizing and intensifying
their own apparatus of repression. On the other side, there were those who proposed
a purely technical or instrumental response to 9/11, drawing on political technologies
(that were also geographical technologies) to profile, predict, and manage the threat
of terrorism as an enduring mode of late-modern government. The emphasis was on
geographies of risk assessment, on geospatial data management and modeling, and on
the vulnerability of biophysical and built environments to terrorist attack.
These two approaches were closely connected; in fact, the one was an inverse of
the other. Where the first drew its energies from a more or less “popular” geographi-
cal imaginary, reproducing its publics through an assiduous dissemination of preju-
dice, the second offered an “expert” solution framed by the privileges of a supposedly
objective science. Where the first directed attention toward the deviant “others” scur-
rying away in the interstices and beyond the bounds of “our” spaces, the second was
focused firmly on protecting our own spaces: “homeland security.” One conjured up
wild spaces, the other safe spaces. As one commentator put it shortly after 9/11, the
world’s wild zones and safe zones collided over New York City (a global cartography
that, as Simon Dalby shows, draws a red line right through the “war on terror”).
1
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2 Derek Gregory and Allan Pred
We regard both responses as crucial failures of a geographical imagination, and
one of the purposes of this book is to explain why: to expose the assumptions they
make and the consequences they have. But the book has a larger purpose too. It is at
once an intellectual and a political project in which we try to signpost other avenues
of analysis that ultimately, we believe, lead to more effective and more just inter-
ventions in contemporary landscapes of terror, fear and political violence. For that
reason, these chapters are not circumscribed by 9/11. Most have been touched by it
in one way or another, many deal directly with the multiple geographies that swirl
around it, but none takes the events of September 11, 2001 as the prism through
which all political violence must now be refracted. On the contrary, one of the central
assumptions that runs through the book is the need to be sensitive to the fractured
histories of violence, predation, and dispossession—as material fact, as lived experi-
ence, and as resonant memory—that erupt so vividly time and time again in our own
present. Thus Gerry Kearns shows how political violence in Ireland is inseparable
from a colonial past that continues to haunt its post-colonial present, and argues
that its contemporary political struggles are in part a struggle over the very terms in
which that history is to be understood. Trevor Paglen shows how the modern produc-
tion of vast tracts of Nevada as secret sites for military testing trades on a history of
colonial dispossession, in which the Shoshone were placed beyond the perimeter of
the American state and consigned to a “black world” where almost anything could be
sanctioned. At the end of the nineteenth century the Spanish-American War gained
much of its popular support in the United States through widespread revulsion at
the concentration camps established in Cuba by the Spanish colonial regime; and
yet after the war, as Derek Gregory shows, the United States leased Guantánamo Bay
as a naval station where, since 9/11, it has reactivated a series of thoroughly colonial
dispositions to establish its own war prison. The “war on terror” draws on more than
a colonial past, however, and Eric Olund reveals how its racialized violence repeats
in displaced and distorted form in the biopolitical strategies pursued by the United
States during the First World War. And Matthew Farish shows how it continues to
draw on tropes that were established in the bipolar world of the cold war. History is
neither a narrative of progress nor a parade of discontinuities, then, and seen thus
9/11 becomes neither an inevitable consequence of U.S. foreign policy nor a cataclys-
mic event that changed the whole world.
Many of the chapters map the imaginative geographies through which political
violence works. They take the cartographies of fear on which it feeds and show how
these representations are never merely mirrors held up to somehow reflect or rep-
resent the world but instead enter directly into its constitution (and destruction).
Images and words release enormous power, and their dissemination—or, for that
matter, suppression—can have the most acutely material consequences. Thus Farish
shows how Area Studies emerged in the United States as a way of localizing American
militarism: the original objective was to diagnose distant dangers that were supposed
to inhere within particular regions. As it turned out, Area Studies often provided
much more nuanced accounts than its progenitors expected, but this has not silenced
demands for caricatures that can masquerade as characterizations. Glassman pro-
vides a particularly vivid example where, since 9/11, the United States has planed
away the diverse political geographies of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand
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Introduction 3
to render them “uniform places of Islamic terrorist threat.” Glassman sees this as an
attempt to revivify the United States’ imperial objectives in South East Asia, but he
is no less sensitive to the opportunistic deployment of a parallel logic by the region’s
own security states. Caricatures are not, of course, a monopoly of the political Right.
Philippe Le Billon shows how advocacy campaigns against so-called conflict com-
modities like diamonds or oil often trade on imaginative geographies that read
violence directly out of places of origin. Hegel’s ghost thus makes its ghastly reap-
pearance as Africa is constructed as synonymous with primitivism and violence, its
diamonds stained with blood, whereas Canada is celebrated as the pure and peaceful
North, its diamonds untainted by violence. Campaigns like these do not really dispel
the fetishism of commodities, as Marx called it, because they hide the exploitative
and exclusionary histories that have accreted around them. Instead, they substitute
a fetishism of place that licenses its own violence against independent, small-scale
diggers and miners.
The imaginative geographies that Farish, Glassman, and Le Billon describe are
more than popular prejudices. They spiral through the state apparatus, the military,
the market, and even the academy. But if they are to have maximum effect then the
ligatures between power, politics, and the production of public spheres (transnational
and domestic) assume a crucial importance. Simon Dalby provides an incisive cri-
tique of the ways in which the geopolitical abstractions of American “tabloid realism”
are currently being deployed by some commentators to advance a new military imag-
inary—a “new map” for the Pentagon—so that the United States’ unified combatant
commands can be reconfigured and redeployed on behalf of “the core” to subdue the
dangerous spaces of the so-called “gap.” This is not the logic exposed by Glassman,
though it is no less disingenuous and dangerous, but what these projects (and others
like them) have in common is the calculated mobilization of popular geographical
prejudices for a public audience in order to (re)direct public policy and, ultimately, to
re-make the world through military violence. Their mappings are simplistic, but this
is their strength as well as their weakness: they provide a geopolitical equivalent of
the sound-bite that so often captures the public imagination.
Both Michael Watts and Nigel Thrift pay scrupulous attention to the mediations
between representation and materialization through the crucial junction term of
practice, though they elaborate this in radically different ways. Watts insists that
revolutionary Islam be treated as a deeply serious political project whose imaginative
geographies of Euro-American modernity cannot be dismissed as so many irrational
rejections of “freedom” (as the White House and Downing Street seem to think).
Dalby makes much the same point: tabloid realism cannot entertain the possibility
that Muslims and millions of others might resist the incursions and interventions of
the global North. In the case of revolutionary Islam, Watts shows that those rejec-
tions are not the product of superstition and ignorance. This is a radically hybrid
project, he argues, whose critique of colonizing modernity is derived from readings
of European radical philosophy as well as Islam. It has been hardened in the crucible
of corrupt and secular nationalisms, and its hideous violence is wired to the spec-
tacular display of death now made possible by modern technologies. Thrift is keenly
interested in the mobilization of those technologies too, and in the mass of witnesses
summoned by them, and he urges us to attend to the ways in which radically new
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