Geographies of Peace and Armed Conflict

Audrey Kobayashi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135756475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This collection addresses the impact of armed conflict and explores pathways to peace across the world. Topics range from geopolitics to the effects of armed conflict on the environment, resources, health, children, and transnational migration. Others explore the social processes involved in post-conflict situations, and others still the lessons for achieving effective peace. The geographical concepts addressed include the notion of "conflict space, " landscapes of terror, the relationship between violence and justice, the conditions for peace, and the dynamics of post-conflict. Methods include landscape analysis, interviews with a range of citizens, mapping and geographic information science, and policy analysis. Several papers address the situation of children in conflict zones, the impact of conflict on patterns of migration, the role of gender in achieving peace, the concept of territory as a basis for conflict and for negotiation of peace, as well as the economic impact of conflict. The studies cover several world regions, including Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and eastern Europe.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

Geographies of Peace and Armed Conflict: Introduction

Audrey Kobayashi

A decade into the 21^st Century there seems no utopian end of warfare in sight. Although we have not seen the nuclear holocaust that in the late 20^th Century many believed would be the outcome of decades of Cold War, armed conflicts are current within and on the part of more countries than were involved in either of the great wars of the 20^th Century. The total armed forces of the world number over 70 million, of whom at least 18 million are in active duty,¹ supported by annual military budgets that total something between two and three trillion dollars. Many countries have military budgets that exceed those for health or education.² Although the number of military casualties has decreased dramatically in recent armed conflicts compared to earlier decades, tens of thousands of civilian casualties annually result from practices such as ethnic cleansing and “collateral” civilian deaths and injuries, as well as from the complex social, economic, political, and environmental perils that armed conflicts instigate. The United Nations estimates that some 42 million people are currently forcibly displaced from their homes, 80 percent of them from developing countries, and that the repatriation of displaced persons is decelerating (UNHCR 2011). Armed conflict results in mass destruction of infrastructure, and the disruption of transportation, communication, health services, and education. Armed conflict is responsible for some of the most serious environmental degradation, and exacerbates other processes such as climate change, drought, or natural resource scarcity. Developing countries suffer disproportionately from these effects, and the poorest citizens, including those displaced from their homes, suffer most of all.

This volume brings together some of the best geographical researchers to address armed conflict and its effects, as well as possibilities and prospects for peace. They cover a wide range of geographical sub-disciplines to address questions of population, resources, political relations, boundaries, environmental change, forging peace, and post-conflict conditions. They address conflicts in all parts of the world, at a variety of scales, including both international and intranational disputes. They speak from a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives. One thing they have in common, however, is a united commitment to play a role in creating a world based on peace, not war.

Geographers and Peace and Conflict

Geographers have a long history of studying armed conflict, and have by no means always been dedicated to peace. Rachel Woodward (2004, 2009) divides the history of military geographies into two approaches: those that contribute to warfare through the application of geographical concepts and tools to military problems, and those who study the effect of military actions, or armed conflict, upon society and the environment. Although the second approach is much more common nowadays, it is by no means universal, and the role of military geographies varies in different parts of the world. In other words, military geographies, and geographies of peace and armed conflict, have their own geography.

Throughout the 19^th and most of the 20^th Centuries, as geography became an established part of university curricula in Europe and North America, most geographers who studied the effects of war adopted a perspective on war as a natural phenomenon (e.g., Ratzel 1897, 1903; Mackinder 1904; Brunhes and Vallaux 1921). As the discipline developed, few spoke out to support a role for the discipline in achieving peace (e.g., Kropotkin 1885; Atwood 1935)³ and most of the discipline evinced at best a morally neutral, functionalist perspective. In a detailed review of the role of geographers and war over the past two centuries, Mamadouh (2005, 34) suggests that “academic geographers were divided into a war-minded camp that saw war as the legitimate expression of competition between states and a peace-minded camp that promoted international cooperation. … Still, geography was mainly an aid to war-waging states.”

As the modern world has emerged, geographers have often played a direct role in affecting the course of armed conflict. At the beginning of the 19^th Century, Napoleon led one of the most effective campaigns using geographers in the pursuit of military aims (Godlewska 1994). In the 20^th Century, perhaps the most infamous case is that of the German school of Geopolitik (Mamadouh 2005, 31), some of whose members were directly involved in strategy for the expansion of Nazism from the 1930s by using geographical principles (Minca and Barnes forthcoming). In the U.S. during World War II, geographers played a significant role in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the intelligence gathering precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In some countries, such as Chile under military rule, geographers were directly involved in strategy and planning even as it became difficult for scholars who did not support the military regime to practice, and many ended up in exile (Caviedes 1991). Indeed, Augusto Pinochet taught geopolitics at the National Military Academy, and published a book on the topic (1968).

Not only have academic geographers played both a direct and an indirect role in armed conflict, but also their work affects fundamentally the larger scholarly context, our understanding of science and its purposes, and the place of our ideas in human society. Barnes and Farish (2006) advance sociologist Andrew Pickering’s claim that World War II represented an “epochal change” (a Foucauldian term) in the nature of science:

The intersection of science and the military in World War II can thus be understood as a macromangling that encompassed both an inner transformation of these two macro-actors and an outer transformation in their relationship to one another. The way of doing science changed from small to big science; the military shifted its tactics and basic disciplines; both institutions were topologically transformed in a reciprocal transformation of shape. … and all of these transformations were interactively stabilized in relation to transformations in machinic culture (symbolized by developments in radar technology). (Pickering 2005, 239, quoted in Barnes and Farish 2006, 809)

Developing the notion of institutional mangling, Barnes and Farish show that the concept of the “region,” surely one of the most intellectually challenging and contested concepts upon which the discipline is based, was much more than academic. Stemming from “belief in the instrumental power of science in achieving national security interests” (p. 810) they chart the relationship between military enterprise and R&D efforts in which regional geography plays a strongly politicized role. Not only did academic geographers play a direct role in the events of World War II (in the U.S. and elsewhere), they also played a major role in fashioning the discipline during the subsequent Cold War, when the science of regions was “mangled” with military strategy, national ideology, and the development of key ideas and methods that transformed the discipline:

In demonstrating that the discipline was very much caught up in the military-industrial-academic complex, the cyborg regime of technoscience, or whatever provocative descriptors are appropriate to the era in question, we point to the external, to the world outside where geography and life itself reside. (Barnes and Farish 2006, 821)

If geographers have been mangled within the study and promulgation of armed (or, in the case of Cold War, potentially armed, conflict), so too have they been mangled in movements for peace. The Cold War period also awakened a strong tradition of peace scholarship (Roder 1973; Hudson 1977; Lacoste 1976, 1977; Hewitt 1983; Kofman 1984; Openshaw and Steadman 1983; Pepper and Jenkins 1983). Pepper and Jenkins (1985) brought much of this peace work into a single volume, a thoughtful and pathbreaking set of analyses by geographers, to draw attention to the spatial implications and human consequences of potential nuclear hostilities, and to point towards the possibility of geographers working directly to counter that possibility.

The end of the Cold War brought an end to scholarship on the specter of nuclear war, but subsequent events have been of equally troubling concern for geographers seeking world peace. Concern has shifted to a new specter, that of terrorism. Especially since 9/11, geographers have refocused their concerns not only on the effects of new technologies of violence facilitated by sophisticated locational tracking systems and geospatial databases, but also upon the potential for geographical technology in preventing and mitigating violence. The line between the two, which represents the dialectic of peace and war, is certainly a troubled one. A volume of papers that walk this line, edited by Cutter, Richardson, and Wilbanks (2003), illustrates the paradoxical nature of our discipline. The editors issue a cri de coeur for research to investigate the root causes of terrorism in all its forms, including social practices of exclusion and inclusion and the geographical dimensions of power and geo-politics. Many of the authors provide compelling evidence of the ways that geographers can contribute in times of emergency using the very technologies that have been instrumental in waging war for waging peace. The range of opinions among geographers internationally over this precarious relationship surely represents one of the most urgent discourses in the history of our discipline. We can expect continued controversy as a result over the role of geographical technologies, the place of geographers in formulating public policy, the relationship between geographers and the state, and the potential for geographers to contribute to peace.

These questions occupy much of the contemporary agenda in the sub-field of political geography. The Geo-politics Reader (Ó Tuathail, Dalby, and Routledge 2006) brings together a historical collection of political statements—including some by geographers, other scholars, and politicians—that represent key moments in the history of geopolitics and conflict. This volume is widely read by students, the academic geographers of the future, for whom gaining a perspective on the relationship between dominant ideologies, forceful personalities, and sociopolitical context is vital (see Sparke 2000).

Increasing numbers of political geographers (several of them represent the current volume) are reading between the lines of such statements. In another recent volume, Violent Geographies, Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (2006) bring together a group of geographers interested in just such between-the-lines analysis that shows that violence breeds violence in ways that are historically rooted, spatially expressed, and exceedingly complex and interwoven with social and political circumstances. The complexity of the dialectics of violence prompts Michael Watts to ask:

Why has the tyranny, oppression, and ruthless austerity of a global neoliberal order in the service of secular American empire generated such a powerful form of resistance (a variant of modern terror), in equal measure ruthless, tyrannical and fanatically single-minded that draws from the deep well of modern Islam? (Watts 2006, 178)

Others have mapped out the complexity of violence and peace in detail, challenging the Manichean compulsion of contemporary geopolitics. Derek Gregory (2005) charts the complicated journey of international relations that mark the “colonial present” in the War on Terror. Feminist geographers also resist the compulsion to good and evil by pointing out that violence is always a choice, often taken in a context of masculine pride and control (Hyndman 2003; Woodward 2006).

Political geographers have made their most compelling contribution to understanding peace and armed conflict by showing that conditions of violence and non-violence need to be placed, that context matters, and that human relations of violence are spatialized. As Matt Coleman (2007) has eloquently argued, conflict involves geopolitics enacting on the ground in specific ways, with reverberations from actual theaters of war to home bodies thousands of miles away, as expressions of engagement of human bodies through the deployment of power, whether of the state, of civil society, or of stateless groups that choose violence as a means of achieving their ends. The more we understand about the ways in which human relations are spatialized, the more we will understand about the complexity of warfare and its effects.

The Geographical Agenda

One of our greatest challenges is to identify and assess the many complex and overlapping factors that influence the development of peace or the escalation of conflicts where geography and life reside. Climate change represents one of the most significant but least understood risks for escalating armed conflict. A recent in-depth study of the Levant, a region with a high level of armed conflict as well as high susceptibility to the deleterious effects of climate change, suggests that risks for increased militarization and conflict come from competition for water resources that co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Geographies of Peace and Armed Conflict: Introduction
• 2. Conceptualizing ConflictSpace: Toward a Geography of Relational Power and Embeddedness in the Analysis of Interstate Conflict
• 3. Oil Prices, Scarcity, and Geographies of War
• 4. Mobilizing Rivers: Hydro-Electricity, the State, and World War II in Canada
• 5. Practicing Radical Geopolitics: Logics of Power and the Iranian Nuclear “Crisis”
• 6. “A Microscopic Insurgent”: Militarization, Health, and Critical Geographies of Violence
• 7. The Political Utility of the Nonpolitical Child in Sri Lanka’s Armed Conflict
• 8. Terror, Territory, and Deterritorialization: Landscapes of Terror and the Unmaking of State Power in the Mozambican “Civil” War
• 9. The Geography of Conflict and Death in Belfast, Northern Ireland
• 10. What Counts as the Politics and Practice of Security, and Where? Devolution and Immigrant Insecurity after 9/11
• 11. Embedded Empire: Structural Violence and the Pursuit of Justice in East Timor
• 12. Armed Conflict and Resolutions in Southern Thailand
• 13. Crafting Liberal Peace? International Peace Promotion and the Contextual Politics of Peace in Sri Lanka
• 14. “Nature Knows No Boundaries”: A Critical Reading of UNDP Environmental Peacemaking in Cyprus
• 15. Innovative Approaches to Territorial Disputes: Using Principles of Riparian Conflict Management
• 16. Walls as Technologies of Government: The Double Construction of Geographies of Peace and Conflict in Israeli Politics, 2002–Present
• 17. Citizenship in the Line of Fire: Protective Accompaniment, Proxy Citizenship, and Pathways for Transnational Solidarity in Guatemala
• 18. Staging Peace Through a Gendered Demonstration: Women in Black in Haifa, Israel
• 19. “Foreign Passports Only”: Geographies of (Post)Conflict Work in Kabul, Afghanistan
• 20. Territorial Tensions: Rainforest Conservation, Postconflict Recovery, and Land Tenure in Liberia
• 21. Halfway to Nowhere: Liberian Former Child Soldiers in a Ghanaian Refugee Camp
• 22. Reconciliation in Conflict-Affected Societies: Multilevel Modeling of Individual and Contextual Factors in the North Caucasus of Russia
• 23. “Post”-Conflict Displacement: Isolation and Integration in Georgia
• 24. Satellite Data Methods and Application in the Evaluation of War Outcomes: Abandoned Agricultural Land in Bosnia-Herzegovina After the 1992–1995 Conflict
• 25. After Ethnic Cleansing: Return Outcomes in Bosnia-Herzegovina a Decade Beyond War
• Index