Call for papers: American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, San Francisco, California, 29 March – 2 April, 2016
Session title: New geographies of war
Organizers: Steven Radil, University of Idaho; Olivier Walther, University of Southern Denmark
Session description: Recent scholarship claims that the phenomenon of war is waning (Pinker 2011). These claims stand in stark contrast to the growing ‘new war’ literature that posits emergent forms of war that involve a variety of new political actors (Kaldor 2012) and, presumably, new spatial arrangements of political power and geopolitical imaginaries. Geographers have played an important role in some debates about war by clarifying the constructed spatial economies of war (Le Billion 2001); drawing attention to the biopolitics of war (Hyndman 2012); showing how war is central to the construction of everyday places and spaces far away from battle zones (Graham 2006); and exploring how geographic technology is implicated in the production of some types of war (Beck 2003). Although geographers have had less to say about the possibly changing nature of war itself, geographic scholarship has much to offer the ‘new war’ debates.
We envision a session that brings together recent geographic scholarship on war that explores themes such as:
Geographic approaches to the ‘new war’ hypothesis
New spatialities of political power
Emergent transnational political networks and movements
Innovative geographic methodologies to the study of war
Contextual approaches to recent civil wars and insurgencies
Contagion effects of war
New dimensions to the normalization and pervasiveness of war
We invite papers on these or related topics. Please send proposed titles and abstracts (250 words or less) and/or expressions of interest to both Steven Radil (sradil@uidaho.edu) and Olivier Walther (ow@sam.sdu.dk) no later than 15 October, 2015.
Sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group.
References:
Beck, R. A. (2003). Remote sensing and GIS as counterterrorism tools in the Afghanistan war: A case study of the Zhawar Kili region. The Professional Geographer, 55(2), 170-179.
Graham, S. (2006). Cities and the ‘War on Terror’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 30(2), 255-276.
Hyndman, J. (2012). The geopolitics of migration and mobility. Geopolitics, 17(2), 243-255.
Kaldor, M. (2012). New and old wars: Organized violence in a global era. 3rd Ed. Malden, MA: Polity.
Le Billon, P. (2001). The political ecology of war: natural resources and armed conflicts. Political Geography, 20(5), 561-584.
Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. New York: Viking.