The Dictionary of Human Geography

recruits from diasporic populations, from
refugeecamps and from city-dwellers who
have been forcefully excluded from the global
economy; and they are involved in trans-local
networks that are non-state, non-formal and
extra-legal, and which in many cases traffic not
only in weapons but inconflict commod-
itiessuch as drugs and diamonds. Mu ̈nkler
(2005, pp. 2, 36) represents these develop-
ments as in some measure a throwback to the
Thirty Years War (1618–48) and, in contrast
to hypermodern forms of warfare, they create
a rhetorical ‘disenchantment’ of war: they are
extraordinarily savage and intensely corporeal,
they deliberately target non-combatants, and
they sustain an economy of lawless predation
(see Gregory, 2009b).
These two modalities of war converged with
extraordinary intensity in the early twenty-first
century in the military operations undertaken
by the USA and its allies in Afghanistan
and Iraq and by Israel in southern Lebanon
and occupied Palestine, where the advanced
weapons systems of state militaries were met
by crude missiles, improvised explosive
devices, suicide bombs and guerrilla raids
(Gregory, 2004b, 2006). Indeed, the two
modalities have increasingly bled into each
other: the US invasion of Afghanistan involved
a high-tech war from the air in support of a
ground war fought by US troops in close con-
cert with the local militias of the Northern
Alliance, for example, while the US occupation
of Iraq prompted the US military to perform a
‘cultural turn’ that accorded local knowledge
a central place within a counter-insurgency
campaign that could not be waged through
firepower alone (Gregory, 2008, 2009a).
Critics have often claimed that American mili-
tary power has been deployed in the service of a
new Americanempire,andMu ̈nkler (2005)
argues that these ‘new wars’ characteristically
develop ‘in the margins and breaches of former
empires’. But the two modalities of war also
increasingly converge in cities. According to
Davis (2004b, p. 15), ‘the poor peripheries of
developing cities will be the permanent battle-
fields of the twenty-first century’, and urban
warfare is an increasing preoccupation of mili-
tary strategists (Graham, 2009a).
These two modalities of contemporary war
have several mutually reinforcing effects:

. They blur the distinctions between war and
peace: many of these conflicts are chronic
with no clearly defined beginning or end,
characterized by ‘peace processes’ rather
than peace agreements.
. They blur the distinctions between war and
commerce: the US military is not only
closely connected to the global armaments
industry, but it also relies on private service
companies and contractors, and militia
leaders and warlords often have a keen
interest in the profits of war.
. They blur the distinctions between civilian and
combatant: they make it difficult to distin-
guish civilian and military spaces; conflicts
increasingly spill across and in some places
even constitute the spaces ofeveryday
life; and in many, perhaps most cases the
majority of casualties are civilians (Giles and
Hyndman, 2004b). Militias are often criti-
cised for their indifference to civilian casu-
alties, but Shaw (2005, pp. 71–97) insists
that the RMA also involves the systematic
transfer of risk to civilians whose deaths are
explained away through either their own
alleged complicity or accidental, ‘collateral
damage’ (see also Gregory, 2006a).
. They blur the distinctions between the real
and the virtual: late modern targeting and
imaging systems radically transform the
visual field of war, and professional armies
are acutely sensitive to the effect ofmedia
images; militias are also keenly aware of the
power of video coverage, and the ‘war on
terror’ has involved the conscious deploy-
ment ofspectacleand the mobilization of
affecton both sides (O ́ Tuathail, 2003;
RETORT, 2005; Gregory, 2006).

Even as the two modalities become entangled

in one another, the distinctions between them

have beenrhetoricallyreaffirmed to produce

an imaginative geography that is also amoral

geography: thus ‘our’ wars are construed as

humane wars because they are fought within

the space of the modern – the space of

Reason, Science and Law – whereas ‘their’ wars

areinhumane because they are located outside

that space. Dexter (2007, 2008) argues that this

de-politicizes late-modern war – ‘Western inter-

vention is elevated to a position above politics’ –

and de-legitimizes all forms of warfare except

those of the globalnorth, which then has both

the obligation and the right to police the frontier

between the two in the name ofsecurity. dg

Suggested reading

Flint (2005); Gregory (2009b); Mu ̈nkler (2005).

water A prerequisite for life on Earth, water,

unlike some ‘natural’resources, has no sub-

stitute. It is present at everyscale, from the

global atmospheric system to the individual

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_W Final Proof page 806 31.3.2009 4:10pm

WATER