W
war The mobilization of military or para-
military violencebetween political comm-
unities. Although thestateis often defined
in terms of its claim to a monopoly on the
legitimate use of physical force, war is not
confined to hostilities between states: civil
warsare intra-state wars,wars of liberationare
fought by resistance movements against (for
example)colonialismor military occupation
(seeoccupation, military), and the global
‘war on terror’ is waged by states against
regional and international terrorist organiza-
tions. Nor is war confined to formal hostilities
between the main parties (‘hot wars’): the
cold warbetween the USA and the Soviet
Union took many forms, including economic
warfare and numerousproxy wars.
The history of geography (seegeography,
history of) has frequently intersected with
the history of war: war has marked the practice
of geographical enquiry and geographical
knowledge has shaped the prosecution of
war. Classical geography knew its strategic
value – Strabo’schorographywas addressed
to military commanders and civil adminis-
trators in the Roman Empire – while the insti-
tutionalization of geography as a university
discipline owed much to the part played
by military geographyin the unexpected
victory of Prussia over France in 1870–1.
Geography was instrumental in the develop-
ment of a ‘New Army’ in Britain in the
early twentieth century (Stoddart, 1992) and
had a pivotal role in the formulation of mod-
ern geopolitics. Since then, geographical
knowledge has been important to war in four
main ways:
. The resort to warthrough the production of
geo-strategic imperatives (seegeopolitics).
. The conduct of warthrough the production
of regional intelligence (Lacoste, 1973;
Heffernan, 1996; Barnes, 2006b: see also
area studies;regional geography).
. The representation of warthrough the pro-
duction ofimaginative geographies of
‘the enemy’ and the conduct of hostilities
(O ́Tuathail, 1996a, 2005; Farish, 2001).
. The memorialization of warthrough the pro-
duction of symbolic landscapes (Falah,
1996; Johnson, 2003b: see alsomemory).
The importance of geography is not surpris-
ing, since war is fought over (and often about)
territory, but new forms of war have intro-
duced more complex concepts ofspace.‘War,’
Hirst (2005, p. 151) insisted, ‘can never be
de-spatialized.’
Yves Lacoste (1976) claimed thatLa ge ́o-
graphie, c ̧a sert, d’abord, a` faire la guerre
(‘Geography’s primary purpose is to make
war’), and in an interview with Lacoste’s
journal, philosopher Michel Foucault was
prompted to trace his own spatial preoccupa-
tions to a series of martial concepts (Foucault,
1976b/1980). In a course of lectures given that
same year, Foucault explored the relations
between sovereign power, disciplinary
powerand war, tracing how the post-medieval
state came to assume the monopoly of legitim-
ate violence,expellingwar to its outer limits
(frontiers) while ‘secretly’ allowing war ‘to
rage in all the mechanisms of power’ beneath
the surface of its own juridical order. Politics
was thus the continuation of war by other
means. Although Carl von Clausewitz (1780–
1831) would eventually propose a strategic
reversal in his treatiseOn war(1832) – ‘War
is not merely a political act but also a real
political instrument, a continuation of political
commerce, a carrying out of the same by other
means’ – Foucault saw this as a deceptive
mapping ofmodernity. Far from war being
an interruption to the project of modernity,
the last resort, the exception to be rationalized
and regulated, war continues to saturate the
social field; its strategies and modes of calcu-
lation are deployed to defend society (the
imperative title of his lectures) against the
dangers ‘that are born in and of its own body’
(Elden, 2002; Foucault, 2003: cf.govern-
mentality). Late modern warfare is wired to
political economy–toneo-liberalismand
its rounds of renewedaccumulationby dis-
possession (Roberts, Secor and Sparke, 2003;
RETORT, 2005: cf.resource wars) – but
on Foucault’s reading it is also intimately
invested in a racializedbiopolitics. Both of
these dimensions have been revealed with
unusual clarity in the US-led ‘war on terror’
in the early twenty-first century (Dauphinee
and Masters, 2007; Dillon and Reid, 2009:
see alsoterrorism).Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_W Final Proof page 804 31.3.2009 4:10pm