PEACE AND GEOPOLITICS: IMAGINING PEACEFUL GEOGRAPHIES
Simon Dalby,
Carleton University,
[email protected]
November 2011
Paper for presentation to the University of Newcastle symposium on “Peace in
Geography and Politics”, Newcastle, November 15th, 2011.
"Only the dead are safe; only the dead have see the end of war." George Santayana
PEACE, WAR AND GEOPOLITICS
This depressing epigraph, frequently erroneously attributed to Plato notably by Ridley
Scott in his cinematic rendition of “Black Hawk Down”, implies that war is a perpetual
part of the human condition. It implies the futility of arguments for peace while invoking
the tragedy of human organised violence that structures much of what has become called
realist international relations scholarship. But the backdrop of Black Hawk Down was a
failed humanitarian intervention, albeit one that took on imperial overtones rather quickly
despite its efforts at peace-making (Dalby 2008). Now in 2011 as famine and violence
once again plague the region, the relationships of war to insecurity, and the failures of
American counter-terrorism policies to resolve many issues once again put the spotlight
on this place. In doing so numerous questions of geopolitics are intertwined with matters
of peace, the responsibility to protect, humanitarian interventions and reinvented banditry
in contemporary times.
This paper suggests this focus on war and violence has to be read against rapidly shifting
geographies and the recent general trend of reduced violence in human affairs. Whether
this is the promise of the liberal peace, a transitory imperial pax, something more
fundamental in human affairs, or a temporary historical blip remains to be seen, but
substantial empirical analyses do suggest that violence is declining (Human Security
Report 2011). This stands in stark contrast to realist assertions of war as the human
condition as well as to repeated warnings about the supposed dangers to international
order of rising Asian powers. Likewise the remilitarization of Anglo-Saxon culture since
9/11 has suggested that warring is a routine part of modern life. But the nature of war has
changed in some important ways even if contemporary imperial adventures in peripheral
places look all too familiar to historians. Peace, all this crucially implies, is a matter of
social processes, not a final Telos, a resolution of the tensions of human life, nor a utopia
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that will arrive sometime. In Christian terms the aspirational “Kingdom of God” is a
work in progress.
Nick Megoran (2011) in particular has suggested that the geography discipline needs to
think much more carefully about peace making and the possibilities of non-violence as
modes of political action. The key question is focused on in the Megoran’s pointed
refusal to accept the simplistic dismissal of the efficacy of non-violence given the
obvious prevalence of violence. The point of his argument is that non-violence is a
political strategy in part to respond to violence, to initiate political actions in ways that
are not hostage to the use of force. In doing so, especially in his discussion of resistance
to Nazi policies in Germany during the war, Megoran (2011) underplays the important
points about legitimacy as part of politics, and likewise hints at the important contrast
between non-violence as a strategic mode of political action. Implied here is that while
war may be politics by other means, to gloss the classic Clausewitzian formulation, nonviolence is politics too. But politics plays in the larger geopolitical context, and this must
not be forgotten in deliberations concerning the possible new initiatives geographers
might take in thinking carefully about disciplinary contributions to peace research and
practice.
Contemporary social theory might point to Michel Foucault, and the argument drawn
from his writings that politics is the extension of war rather than the other way round.
Given the interest in biopolitics and geogovernance within the discipline these matters are
obviously relevant but the connection to peace needs to be thought carefully beyond
formulations that simply assume it as the opposite of wars (Morrissey 2011). This is
especially the case given the changing modes of contemporary warfare and the advocacy
of violence as an appropriate policy in present circumstances. The modes of warfare at
the heart of liberalism suggest that the security of what Reid and Dillon (2009) call the
biohuman, the liberal consuming subject, involves a violent series of practices designed
to pacify the world by the elimination of political alternatives. The tension here suggests
an imperial peace, a forceful imposition of a state of non-war. In George W. Bush’s terms
justifying the war on terror, a long struggle to eliminate tyranny (Dalby 2009a). Peace is,
in this geopolitical understanding, what comes after the elimination of opposition. In late
2011 such formulations dominated discussions of the death of Colonel Gadaffi in Libya.
The dramatic transformation of human affairs in the last couple of generations do require
that would-be peaceful geographers look both to the importance of non-violence and
simultaneously to how global transformations are changing the landscape of violence and
social change, all of it still under the threat of nuclear devastation should major inter-state
war occur once again. The re-emergence of non-violence as an explicit political strategy,
and in particular the use of Gene Sharp’s (1973) ideas of non-violent direct action in
recent events pose these questions very pointedly. Geographers have much to offer in
such re-thinking that may yet play their part in a more global understanding of how
interconnected our fates are becoming and how inappropriate national state boundaries
are as the premise for political action in a rapidly changing biosphere.
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But to do so some hard thinking is needed on geopolitics, and on how it works as well as
how peace-full scholarship might foster that which it desires. Linking the practical
actions of non-violence from Tahrir Square to those of the Occupy Wall Street actions,
underway as the first draft of this paper was keyboarded, requires that we think very
carefully about the practices that now are designated in terms of globalization. Not all
this is novel, but the geopolitical scene is shifting in ways that need to be incorporated
into the new thinking within geography about war, peace, violence and what the
discipline might have to say about, and contribute to, non-violence as well as to
contestations of contemporary lawfare (Gregory 2006).
Whether the delegitimization of violence as a mode of rule will be extended further in
coming decades is one of the big questions facing peace researchers. The American
reaction to 9/11 set things back dramatically, an opportunity to respond in terms of
response to a crime and diplomacy was squandered, but the wider social refusal to accept
repression and violence as appropriate modes of rule has interesting potential to constrain
the use of military force. The professionalization of many high technology militaries also
reduces their inclination to involve themselves in repressing social movements, although
here Mikhail Gorbachev’s refusal to use the Red Army against dissidents in Eastern
Europe in the late 1980s remains emblematic of the changes norms of acceptable rule that
have been extended in the last few generations.
A geography discipline seriously interested in peace needs to link the social processes on
the relatively small scale such as the non-violent protests Megoran (2011) highlights, and
the peaceful accompaniment actions that Koopman (2011) documents, to the larger
geopolitical transformations of our times, to make the eminently geographical point that
peace activities vary widely from place to place, but now are an important part of larger
contemporary geopolitical transformations.
GEOPOLITICS IN HISTORY
Geopolitics has mostly been about rivalries between great powers and their contestations
of power on the large scale. These specifications of the political world focus on states and
the perpetuation of threats mapped as external dangers to supposedly pacific polities.
Much geopolitical discourse specifies the world as a dangerous place, hence precisely
because of these mappings, one supposedly necessitating violence in what passes for a
realist interpretation of great powers as the prime movers of history (Mearsheimer 2001).
Geopolitical thinking is about order and order is in part a cartographic notion. Juliet Fall
(2010) once again emphasizes the importance of taken for granted boundaries as the
ontological given of contemporary politics. Politics is about the cartographic control of
territories, as Megoran (2011) too ponders regarding the first half of the twentieth
century, but it also about much more than this, despite the fascination that so many
commentators have with the ideal form of the supposedly national territorial state. Part of
what geographers bring to the discussion of peace is a more nuanced geographical
imagination than that found in so much of international studies (Dalby 2011a).
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On the other hand much of the discussion of peace sees war as the problem, peace as the
solution. Implied in that is geopolitics as the problem, mapping dangers turns out to be a
dangerous enterprise insofar as it facilitates the perpetuation of violence by representing
other places as threats to which our place is susceptible. But this only matters if this is
related to the realist assumptions of the inevitability of rivalry, the eternal search for
power as key to humanity’s self-organisation and the assumption that organized violence
is the ultimate arbiter (Dalby 2010). Critical geopolitics is about challenging such
contextualizations, and as such its relationships to peace would seem to be obvious, albeit
as Megoran (2011) notes mostly by way of a focus on what Galtung (1969, 1971) calls
negative peace. Given the repeated reinvention of colonial tropes in contemporary
Western political discourse such critique remains an essential part of a political
geography that grants peoples “the courtesy of political geography” (Mitchell and Smith
1991). Undercutting the moral logics of violence, so frequently relying on simplistic
invocations of geographical inevitability, to structure their apologetics, remains a crucial
contribution.
Both the practical matters of recent history and the scholarly contributions by
geographers do not allow simple binary distinctions of peace and war to be used as the
premise of either scholarship or political practice. History and scholarship suggest rather
that peace is what comes after war; the relationship is temporal, stages in matters of
violence, geography and reorganizing facts on the ground. Historically in the era of
European warfare, coincident with the rise of modernity, that many people hope is now
near its end, peace was that which was imposed by the victors, who in turn were the most
powerful in whatever contest was followed by a “peace”. Much recent geographical
scholarship suggests that post conflict re-construction is a mode of peace building
literally (Kirsch and Flint 2011). But those of us who would challenge war as a human
institution, or think about non-violence as a strategy for a better world, will not be
satisfied with a geography that is concerned only to pick up the pieces and reconfigure
them after they have been shattered by the latest round of organized violence.
The key points are that reconstruction is a violent transformation of society, a world
where frequently neo-liberal globalization is seen as the imposition of social forms that
will not resist its logics. Hence peace is what victors impose, an imperial peace that may
eventually be quite welcome to those who benefit from the new arrangements. Is peace
then post-war? Perhaps it can be understood in these terms. But the corollary is the
equally important point that peace is also frequently what comes before the next war. The
normal human situation these days is a matter of non-war, but it is far from clear where
security is enforced that this is more than a limited form of negative peace. Without
large-scale de-militarization then peace is just what happens between wars. But given this
then one additional key point that geographers interested in war need to pay attention to
is the matter of how peace fails, how conflict escalates and how geography matters in
these processes (Flint et al 2009). Peacekeeping is frequently about geographical
separation as the Orwellian names for contemporary walls in terms of lines of peace have
it. But there is much more geographical thinking to be done about these matters and the
scales of interactions across supposedly peaceful borders, not least where what matters
most is state security and its ordering principles rather than local interactions across
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frontiers. This is so not least because of the marked current trend to build fences around
states as the supposed solution to numerous security challenges (Jones 2011).
Putting matters into historical context also suggests that war is not what it used to be, at
least not after the events of the 1940s. Negative peace is about preventing conflict; nonviolence is about political strategies to delegitimise violence, to challenge the human
norms of behavior that allow cultures of violence. It is important to link this to the issues
of what are now called lawfare (Morrissey 2011), the use of law as power and coercion to
set the rules of social and political life too. This has been a key part of the US strategy for
a long time; shaping institutions to the benefit of the US economy as been what much of
international relations has been about, but the larger benefits of constraining conflict are
part of the larger process that international law struggles to legitimize. Rules of conduct
matter in the international system and the wide-scale repudiation of the American
invasion of Iraq in 2003 demonstrated this point clearly.
The United Nations effectively made war illegal although the number of ways round that
formal restriction has been considerable. War departments were renamed defence
departments the world over, and policing, surveillance, spying as well as military action
became increasingly reconfigured in terms of security. The United Nations executive
committee however was named the Security Council not the Peace Council, and the
rhetoric ever since has suggested that peace has to be conjoined with security, with the
latter not the former paramount. Apparently peace without security isn’t worth bothering
about. It's peace and security. Which suggests that war is perhaps the opposite of security
as well as of peace. But perhaps security is to be contrasted to violence instead? All of
which requires careful conceptual thinking about the current geopolitical borders.
Crucial, but unremarked upon by many political geographers, is the simple fact that there
is now widespread agreement that borders between states are fixed finally (Zacher 2001).
Demarcation disputes, and no doubt some very interesting arguments about changing
coastal boundaries as sea levels rise in coming decades will continue, but the territorial
fixity assumption has changed one fundamental facet of warfare between states. Given
the importance of territorial disputes historically as a cause of wars this point is
important. So too is the finding that it matters greatly how these disputes are handled.
Treated as “realist” matters of power politics territorial matters are more likely to lead to
war than if diplomacy and conflict resolution are taken seriously (Vasquez and Henehan
2011).
The exceptions here do seem to prove the rule: Palestine and Kashmir are two flashpoints
where attempts to move borders, or at least the refusal to accept their imposition, are key
to continued violence. Fixing geographical borders removes one major historical cause of
interstate warfare. Territorial aggrandizement is now mostly a thing of the past, as the
reconstruction of Bosnia and the refusal to change antecedent boundaries illustrates,
albeit very painfully. The title of Gearoid O’Tuathail and Carl Dahlman’s (2011) book is
Bosnia Remade, not Bosnia Removed, and that matters in terms of how politics is now
literally mapped. This norm matters greatly and the importance of agreement on frontiers
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and their delimitation tragically continues in the southern areas of what until recently was
the singular state of Sudan in particular.
CONTEMPORARY GEOPOLITICAL CHANGES
While there is optimism over the territorial covenant on both the small scale and the very
large scale the fixity of boundaries has not prevented either the violence of what Mary
Kaldor (2006) called the new wars after the cold war, nor imperial adventures by the
United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and other metropolitan states. Indeed looking
at the macro-scale patterns of imperial power the question is whether current Middle East
warring is but the latest phase of “Anglosphere” imperial violence (Megoran 2009).
Robert Fisk's (2006) subtitle to his huge book on the region is blunt in posing the matter
as the conquest of the Middle East. Understanding the United States and the United
Kingdom, with various settler colonies as extensions of an Anglosphere suggests only
that the patterns of conquest, and indirect but violent rule have shifted to another region
of the planet, from North America in the eighteenth century to South Asia and then
Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, finally now the pattern is extended
to the Middle East in the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. This
shifting pattern of Anglosphere violence is the updated logic of Kevin Phillips (1997)
argument about the Cousin's Wars as key to the rise of British and subsequently
American power. Thus focusing on the specific geographies of the war on terror is a
useful antidote to the hugely exaggerated claims of Islamic threats as a global
phenomenon invoking the need for an American lead world war (Podhoretz 2007).
But elsewhere violence has followed resources, at least to the sources of valuable ones
and oil in particular (Le Billon and Cervantes 2009). Mary Kaldor’s (2006) analysis of
the new wars suggests both that globalization matters in terms of the patterns of
connection that fuel and fund violence, and also in that the role of political violence is
often about control of population and economic assets rather than a matter of territorial
control. Militias and gangs, as well as would be micro-nationalists are not the warring
entities of nation states in violent competition invading each other’s territories; they are
more diffuse arrangements, something more analogous to medieval geographies rather
than the violent interactions of discrete clearly demarcated modern states. This is not
unrelated to the imposition of the cartography of the territorial covenant, even if it has
generated whole new categories of geopolitics, of ungoverned areas and regional
peripheral regions where violence persists, and drones, interventions and mercenaries are
commonplace.
Over the last few decades the potential for major power warfare seems to have lessened,
whatever about great power interventions in peripheral places. The global economy has,
of late, required much greater cooperation between political elites. The looming crises of
climate change that make unilateral action less efficacious, suggest the possibilities of
less confrontational assumptions as the premise in geopolitics. While resource wars get
headlines, much of environmental politics is about cooperation and treaty-making rather
than warfare (Dinar 2011). Much of the contemporary violence that grabs the attention of
headline writers is matters of conflict, competition and rivalry but it is not the classical
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war Clausewitz pointed to as the contest between two autonomous combatants in a
struggle of wills fought until one forces the other to concede. Much of this might fit into
his categories of small wars, but that in itself is significant if it supports the contention
that great powers have given up the use of major war, if not police actions, as policy.
Simultaneously the rapid changes in military technology have changed the nature of
potential warfare between great powers and the kind of violence they unleash in
peripheral regions. Nuclear weapons add a great complication to calculations of violence,
and the ability of intercontinental range weapons to strike rapidly adds to the difficulty of
thinking through the possible scenarios for successful military action. This technology
has been key to the recent revolution in military affairs (Dalby 2009a). The industrial
powers now need capital and technology much more than they do military manpower to
make war and this too has changed both the incentives to use violence and the costs of
doing so. Drone wars are effectively casualty avoidance exercises for those who have
drones. Cyber wars, if in fact the general bad behaviour, espionage and hacking that so
troubles contemporary security thinkers is understood as war (Deibert and Rohozinski
2010), have neither territory nor physical combat at all. Hence they simply don’t meet the
standard social science definitions of war as a situation involving one thousand battle
casualties within a year. Is this war or something else?
Over the last few decades, despite the re-militarization of American, British and much of
the rest of the Anglosphere’s political culture, in the name of homeland security and
related themes, the long-term trend to reduction of violence seems to he holding (Human
Security Report 2005). Another serious war in South West Asia may yet upset this trend,
especially if Saudi Arabia and Iran come to blows and Israel and the USA get involved.
The petroleum infrastructure in the region that literally fuels globalization would, in those
circumstances be targeted, and the global economy disrupted; such is the current Iranian
mode of deterrence. If states operate in narrow self-interest in response rather than in a
collaborative way to deal with the disruptions all sorts of confrontations are possible.
Narrow notions of national security may trump broader notions of peace, never mind
regional or global security. If this happens all the dangers of escalation as states find
themselves in position that force them to choose sides in a polarising situation may play
out in the complex conflictspace of another war (Flint et.al 2009).
PEACE AND SECURITY
Nick Megoran conjoins war “and” peace in his response to Derek Gregory’s (2010) paper
on War and Peace. But to think through the possible meanings of peace these days, and
how geographers might make a useful contribution it seems that it is also necessary to
think about peace and security. To do so requires tackling the dominant practices of
legitimization that constructed huge infrastructures of “security” in the last century.
Surveillance and spying aren’t new, but the massive bureaucracies that now police
political order in the West, justified in terms of the war on terror, now that communism
has ceased to be an obviously threatening geopolitical phenomenon, are supposedly about
maintaining peace and safety, and doing so by ensuring that the present political economy
is maintained. Order is being secured in all this. If that requires repression, a matter or
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emergency measures justified in terms of national security, then so be it. Security trumps
democracy, order is, as Hedley Bull (1977) used to remind his readers, prior to justice.
The major concern in terms of the infringements of the liberties of at least Western
populations has been the grounds for intense legal contestations, most notably of
Guantanamo (Gregory 2006), but elsewhere too, a matter that relates once again to
authority and legitimacy as key to politics, a matter of lawfare in many places, but one
that is crucial to arguments for non-violent direct action.
The militarization of responses to protests at international summit meetings in the 1990s
raised the spectre of police states beyond the control of legal proceedings, but in the
process challenged the legitimacy of many state practices. Finding appropriate venues to
argue back against the injustices of the present is precisely the genius in the slogan of
“Occupy Wall Street” and the related application of the principles of non-violence to
make the political point concerning whose side the security forces actually are on. The
Egyptian military finessed the point rather well in Cairo early in 2011; maintaining
control while refusing to use violence against the protestors in Tahrir square.
The protestors in the Occupy Wall Street movement pushed matters of gross inequality,
and the consequences of the present capitalist system squarely onto the agenda, raising
the issue of peaceful protest, and likewise posing the persistent questions as to whence
the source of violence in present political arrangements where officers of financial
institutions make millions of dollars off derivative trading and dubious mortgages
apparently immune from the disastrous consequences such things have for the lives of
millions of people. This is now posing Johan Galtung’s (1969, 1971) questions about
structural violence and its geographies rather pointedly and tying the discussion once
again to what it is that is being secured if only a negative peace is considered important.
These issues are nearly impossible to consider without a discussion within Western states
about the human security agenda. The aftermath of the cold war brought about a much
wider debate concerning security, and the needs of many impoverished peoples for the
provision of basic modes of security to allow development to happen. Codified in the
1994 UN Human Development program report, the human security agenda subsequently
became tied into the Responsibility to Protect discussion notions of humanitarian
intervention gained fairly widespread credence in international politics (Kaldor 2007).
Tied into this is a series of arguments about warfare and intervention that frequently
suggest that the only possible form of political order that is acceptable is a liberal one,
populated by the biohuman consumer that has to be secured if peace is to reign (Dillon
and Reid 2009).
More recently human security principles have been once again brought into disrepute by
the cavalier use of it as justification for the bombing campaign to force regime change in
Libya. The ostensible rationale for intervention was population protection, but
effectively, as was done in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s NATO provided rebels with
an airforce that greatly enhanced their capabilities. Law and lawfare need to be thought
together if we are to link power and order on the biggest scale but this needs to confront
the relationships of peace and security too (Morrissey 2011). This is necessary precisely
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because there are important geographies to who is secure where and how decisions to
“intervene” there are made by people here. Human security apparently requires
interventions in some places and not others. Nowhere in the official documents is it
seriously contemplated that Southern actors might “intervene” in the metropoles to
ensure the safety of Southern populations in the face of climate change or other
environmental dangers generated mostly in the North (Dalby 2009b).
All of this requires a geographical imagination that links something along the lines of
John Agnew’s (2009) formulation of regimes of globalization where some rules apply,
and only some boundaries apply some of the time in a very unequal global political
economy, to Stuart Elden’s (2009) notions of contingent sovereignty, where effectively
external powers decide when the normal rules of territorial integrity don’t apply and
“interventions” are justified. Note that these interventions don’t change frontiers, they
just suspend sovereignty until such time as the rulers judged to be no longer acceptable
are replaced by more congenial figures, following which formal sovereignty is reasserted.
If peacemaking is the replacement of regimes that are not enthusiastic supporters of the
neo-liberal order of our times, then this looks more like imperialism than anything else,
however much the pacification of peripheral polities may be justified in terms of the
responsibility to protect.
Security for whom remains the key question, but nuancing it with security precisely
where will undoubtedly help analysis in coming years. Key to this is focusing the
militarization of security and the assumptions that force rather than negotiation and larger
cultures of political engagement are most important in security provision. Challenging
this assumption remains a key intellectual task, although one made easier recently for
geographers where empirical work suggests both that peaceful strategies work best in
dealing with territorial issues (Vasquez and Henehan 2011) as too with resource and
environmental matters (Dinar 2011).
MILITARIZATION AND POPULAR GEOPOLITICS
In the Anglosphere in particular, although elsewhere too, the war on terror facilitated the
militarization of many things and the incorporation of many political questions into the
language and practices of security. This has spilled over into numerous matters of popular
culture and in the process generated a rapidly growing literature within geography
concerning popular geopolitics and the securitization of everyday life (Ingram and Dodds
2009) as well as revisiting the complicated matters of citizenship, territory and military
violence (Cowen and Gilbert 2008). While cultural critique of the militarist assumptions
informing contemporary citizenship and the formulation of endangered identities are part
of the geographer’s task these days, what matters is how these themes are integrated into
practices of peace, and peacemaking. How they are is a matter for empirical examination
in particular places.
Ridiculing the simplistic invocations of identity, the violent tropes of xenophobia, and the
representations of supposedly threatening others, as much of the popular geopolitics
literature does these days (Dittmer 2010) is useful insofar as it undercuts the logics used
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in mobilizing for war or the use of political violence, but the difficulty in this literature
lies in the undoubted dangers of being seduced by the simple pleasures of movie criticism
and in the process losing track of the political purpose of critique. Popular geopolitics this
maybe but the links to critical geopolitics are tenuous at best without the key linkages
with the larger matters of securitization and the implicit geographies of violence.
Challenging the tropes of war and the rush to impose political solutions can be usefully
done by making the connections between cultural activities and the formulation of
dangerous places in need of virtuous violence. In so far as popular culture provides the
political vocabulary to argue back against calls to securitize all manner of supposed
threats this matters both as geographical scholarship and practical politics.
The discussions of popular geopolitics may have much to offer if the analyses are
extended to popular representations of resistance to militarization. The movie Avatar
works to challenge the identities of those caught up in the expropriation of resources from
the peripheral areas of global commerce, but falls back on tropes of redemptive violence
in the final denouement. It is precisely this return to violence that makes such efforts at
resistance a reinvention of war. Undercutting this tendency is key to peacemaking, and
has to be a matter for geographers trying to understand the complex relations between
peace and place, and how these can be reinforced by practical actions, whether it is to
insist on the possibilities of international agreements and international law as the arbiter
of many things, or to engage in the practical matters of accompaniment and bearing
witness to the violence used by the rich an powerful to maintain their privileges.
Related to this is the matter of confronting warrior identities. In so far as heroic
masculinity has been part of the re-militarisation of the war on terror, it has worked to
emphasize themes of a world in need of virtuous violence. But as that war winds down
and the ongoing occupation of Afghanistan and withdrawl from Iraq proceed the sense of
that world as dangerous is once again being challenged by larger humanitarian concerns
that make the figure of the warrior much more complicated (Dalby 2008). Heroic
masculinity is invoked in so many confrontations that this obviously needs to be tackled
by geographers interested in linking the personal and the geopolitical. Here too it is
precisely the refusal of such posturing and the rejection of the implicitly confrontational
logic of competitive masculinity that non-violence as a political strategy emphasizes.
Undercutting the social games of showing off, “geltung” in Wagner’s (1996)
terminology, of assuming winners and losers, of politics as being first and foremost about
winning, imposing will in contests in Clausewitzian terms, are all part of strategies
designed to undercut the logics of violence that constitute war.
All this is also complicated by the fact that professional militaries in the Western states
are increasingly a small social minority, one that frequently sees itself as under
appreciated by a civilian population that thinks violence is uncivilized. On the other hand
the professionalization of the military and the clear understanding that it is a technically
specialist social organization, while frequently running up against long-standing military
traditions, is also a casualty averse organization that now usually prides itself of technical
proficiency rather than whole-scale slaughter as an appropriate modus vivendi. Extended
into the rapid proliferation of robot weapons, only most obviously the aerial drones that
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get most of the headline attention with their attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and
Somalia, the technology of death now frequently too undermines the warrior culture
(Singer 2009). How robots are figured in the logics of contemporary warfare matters;
their peaceful possibilities needs attention too if we are to avoid Steve Graham’s (2010)
nightmare worlds of militarized urbanism in coming decades.
ASPIRATION, ANALYSIS AND ADVOCACY
Thinking intelligently about peace within the discipline of geography requires us to
juxtapose our aspirations to a peaceful world, one beyond war and at least the most
egregious injustices of structural violence, with careful analysis of how the world is being
changed so that useful advocacy is possible. Contrary to arguments that construct a real
world of politics separate from peace activism, one commonly formulated in terms of an
autonomous realm of the international, the arguments from both critical international
relations thinking as well as the early critical geopolitics discussions were precisely that
the reasonings of politics are part of politics, and that thinking carefully about the
ontological framings invoked in political discourse matter as part of the political world
that constitutes the possible options for political actors.
The task for scholars in present times, as so often in the past has to be to keep
aspiration, analysis and advocacy in creative tension; wishful thinking has to be avoided
at each stage, but if intellectual activity is to be useful in making a more peaceful world
then naivety is no help. Analysis can channel aspiration into useful advocacy precisely by
acting as an antidote to either emotional impulse or thoughtless heroic gestures. It is
crucial to the task of the academic and as such linking academic activity directly into
practical action is simply part of our trade. Teaching matters greatly here, and careful
advocacy of peaceful possibilities is key to teaching critical geopolitics. The scholarly
research both on territory and war as well as discussions of environmental degradation
and its security implications both show clearly that how these issues are handled matters
greatly. Confrontation is not inevitable; political initiatives toward cooperation rather
than real politik lead to constructive solutions. Continuing to challenge determinist
arguments that argue otherwise remains a key task for geographers (Kearns 2009).
Delegitimization of violence is a key part of all this. Ending death penalties, reducing
physical abuse, torture, Amnesty International campaigns and international solidarity in
the face of suffering as well as extending the norms of politics and the appropriate
cultural modes acceptable for ruling. It is precisely the failure of the US to live up to
supposedly higher civilizational standards in Abu Graib, Guantanamo and now in the
targeting of drone weapons that undermines its legitimacy in many places (Gregory 2010,
Hannah 2006). Coupled with the great lengths to which the United States has gone to
render its actions legitimate, and to avoid potential problems with the international
criminal court, matters of legality offer considerable options for activist geographers to
contribute to changing societal norms away from militarism. The links to critical legal
geographies need further attention too; jurisdiction matters (Gregory 2006)!
12
The overall conclusion from this paper is that geographers should never forget that
politics is prior to all the other discussions and understanding peace in the context of
particular forms of politics is not unrelated to the forms of rule and authority invoked in
particular situations. Contextualisations continue to matter greatly; there are complex
geographies to all this. The world is changing rapidly but shaping that change is a matter
of practical initiatives, and peacemaking. This simple point should never be forgotten
neither should the opposite point that war may happen despite good intentions. No doubt
in the next few years there will be further reflections on the processes that lead to the
outbreak of the First World War, The Guns of August in Barbara Tuchman’s (1962)
famous terms, or what Niall Ferguson (2006) discusses in terms of metaphors of a train
wreck. Building institutions that can negotiate and cooperate in the face of destabilizing
crises events matters greatly, notwithstanding the popular animosity towards
governments built up by a generation of neo-liberal ideology and right wing populist
movements generously funded by those with an interest in turning states into the tools of
capital.
In the face of endless neo-Malthusian fears of scarcities and disruptions to come, the
possibilities of a more peaceful world remain achievable in many places. Challenging
fearful cartographies, refusing the designation of difference and distance as necessarily
dangerous has long been part of the geographers’ potential contribution, as Nick Megoran
reminds us all frequently with his repeated invocation of Peter Kropotkin’s (1885)
statement concerning what geography ought to be. Thinking long and hard about the
diffusion of military technologies and the possible ways geographers might usefully
contribute to the discussions of arms control, not least the key point about the implicit
geopolitics in the supposedly technical arrangements of weapons limitation verifications
matters too (Dalby 2011b). Arms control needs very much more attention.
Ultimately geopolitics is crucial in that if the dominant mappings of politics continue to
specify the world in terms of territorial domains of rule in rivalry with one another, and
with military force as the ultimate arbiter, then the possibilities of its use remain on the
agenda. Realists will argue that this is inevitable. But if the pacification of international
national, or perhaps that should be inter-imperial, relations that the United Nations
system has begun, is extended then the possibilities of a pacific geopolitics open up. Now
the challenge is to see new modes of rule that deal with the most important mappings of
an interconnected globe where ecological matters require mappings of interconnection
rather than borders of autonomous entities (Dalby 2009b).
Who decides the future of the planet matters greatly, but politics remains at least so far a
matter of who decides long before it is a matter of what gets decided over. That too is a
matter for peaceful geographers to tackle; the fate of the earth is at stake, and as a
discipline with aspirations to study it as humanity’s home, our attention is certainly
warranted. In the circumstances of rapid global change and the potential disruptions that
are coming, we now have additional compelling reasons to work towards making
Santayana’s dismal assertion concerning the inevitability of war a thing of the past.
13
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