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religion,ideology,artor cosmology, is used
to legitimize direct or structural violence. In
comparison to other social sciences,human
geographycame late to theorizing violence,
but Hays-Mitchell (2005) has invoked afemi-
nist analysis that draws on these diverse
understandings, specifically as social, political,
and economic violence.
In fact, feminist geographers have long ana-
lysed geographies of violence against women
and sexual minorities, both domestic and non-
domestic, as well as the built environments
that engender safer spaces (Valentine, 1998;
Domosh and Seager, 2001) (seefeminist
geographies). Their work has recently
extended to the ways in which violence during
waris highly gendered (Mayer, 2000; Giles
and Hyndman, 2004a). In 1996, for the first
time in history, the international tribunal for
war crimes in Yugoslavia prosecuted rape as a
weapon of war and a crime against humanity,
issuing indictments for torture and enslave-
ment. This charge moved rape from the
private realm, where it was an informal aber-
ration of war, to a public one in which can be
formally prosecuted.
Modernstatesnot only claim a monopoly
of the legitimate means of violence; they also
routinely use the threat of violence to enforce
the rule oflaw. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
(1998) outlines how the state has the capacity
to make and enforce laws, but also the power
to suspend them in times of emergency, thereby
creating spaces of exception (seeexception,
space of). Anthropologist Thomas Blom
Hansen (2005, p. 111) notes that within such
spaces ‘the law is identical with violence but it
is a particular form of violence’. Hansen shows
howsovereigntyis an unstable and precar-
ious expression of power that requires con-
stant repetition and performance, including
the threat of violence, to maintain its legitim-
acy. It follows that political violence can
assume many forms, and thatterrorism–in
the sense of mobilizing fear as a weapon to
intimidate a civilian population – cannot sens-
ibly be confined to the actions of non-state
actors. The terrorist attacks on the USA on
11 September 2001 produced a stream of
work exploring geographies of political vio-
lence by both state and non-state actors
(Gregory and Pred, 2007), and it is also clear
that violence, in the form of riots or protests,
can be a response to state oppression (Kaur,
2005).
Economic violence has been a particular
concern of marxist geographies, where a
primary focus of research is on modes ofdispossession and exploitation. The process
of capital accumulation has required
repeated rounds of dispossession, in the past
and in the present, and is written into the
prospectus of neo-liberalism (Harvey,
2003b; Springer, 2008) (see colonialism;
imperialism; primitive accumulation).
Exploitation is also written in to the labour
process and wreaks its own violence in multiple
capitalist and non-capitalist forms and their
articulations (see, e.g.,slavery). Violence is
often inscribed in thelandscape, sometimes
deliberately so to intimidate others, while
Mitchell (2002b) argues that its aestheticization
erases the conflict-laden work of its production
and thus contributes to a generalized economy
of violence. This is part of a wider process of the
commodification ofspace, and Blomley (2003)
contends that physical violence is an intrinsic
part of the foundation, legitimation and oper-
ation of Westernpropertyregimes.
The real challenge is to trace the connections
between these and other modes of violence:
for violence cannot keep within the artificially
produced and policed boundaries of the social,
the political and the economic. jhvirtual geographies A term describing the
geographical imaginaries and visualiza-
tionsmade possible through the use of com-
puter network technologies such as the
internetand virtual reality (VR). Propelled
by the extraordinary growth and development
of computerized networks such as the Internet
since the mid-1990s, virtual geographies have
become an increasingly important means of
imagining, simulating, visualizing and repre-
senting geographical worlds. They are (re)pro-
duced through computerized and animated
digital animations,geographic information
systems, immersive VR systems, video games
and the three-dimensional simulation of geo-
graphicalplaces, and call forth an enormous
range of virtual geographical worlds and visual
metaphors as means of entertainment, projec-
tions of fantasy, and instruments for planning
and controlling places in new ways.
Geographical mapping and representation
of the technologies ofcyberspacehas been
an important element in the critical analysis
of virtual geographies. Here, geographers have
sought to explore, first, how geographical
metaphors and representations have been
widely used as means to structure and make
legible the electronic services accessible over
the web. Second, they have developed a range
of new cartographic techniques to map
the complex and unequal geographies thatGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_V Final Proof page 799 30.3.2009 7:45pmVIRTUAL GEOGRAPHIES