ABSTRACT

"Violent Geographies is essential to understanding how the politics of fear, terror, and violence in being largely hidden geographically can only be exposed in like manner. The 'War on Terror' finally receives the coolly critical analysis its ritual invocation has long required."

—John Agnew, Professor of Geography, UCLA

"Urgent, passionate and deeply humane, Violent Geographies is uncomfortable but utterly compelling reading. An essential guide to a world splintered and wounded by fear and aggression—this is geography at its most politically engaged, historically sensitive, and intellectually brave."

—Ben Highmore, University of Sussex

"This is what a ‘public geography’ should be all about: acute analysis of momentous issues of our time in an accessible language. Gregory and Pred have assembled a peerless group of critical geographers whose essays alter conventional understandings of terror, violence, and fear. No mere gazetteer, Violent Geographies shows how place, space and landscape are central components of the real and imagined practices that constitute organised violence past and present. If you thought terror, violence, and fear were the professional preserve of security analysts and foreign affairs experts this book will force you to think again."

—Noel Castree, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University

"A studied, passionate and moving examination of the way in which the violent logics of the ‘War on Terror’ have so quickly shuttered and reorganized the spaces of this planet on its different scales. From the book emerges a critical new cartography that clearly charts an archipelago of a large multiplicity of ‘wild’ and ‘tamed’ places as well as ‘black holes’ within and between which we all struggle to live."
—Eyal Weizman, Director, Goldsmiths College Centre for Research Architecture

chapter |6 pages

Introduction

chapter 4|21 pages

Cosmopolitanism's Collateral Damage

The State-Organized Racial Violence of World War I and the War on Terror

chapter 5|16 pages

Refuge or Refusal

The Geography of Exclusion

chapter 6|17 pages

Imperialism Imposed and Invited

The “War on Terror” Comes to Southeast Asia

chapter 7|22 pages

Spaces of Terror and Fear on Colombia's Pacific Coast

The Armed Conflict and Forced Displacement Among Black Communities 1

chapter 8|20 pages

Fatal Transactions

Conflict Diamonds and the (Anti)Terrorist Consumer *

chapter 10|30 pages

Revolutionary Islam

A Geography of Modern Terror

chapter 11|32 pages

Vanishing Points

Law, Violence, and Exception in the Global War Prison

chapter 13|17 pages

Targeting the Inner Landscape

chapter 15|14 pages

The Pentagon's New Imperial Cartography

abloid Realism and the War on Terror

chapter 16|20 pages

Demodernizing by Design

Everyday Infrastructure and Political Violence 1

chapter 17|20 pages

The Terror City Hypothesis 1

chapter 18|13 pages

Banal Terrorism

Spatial Fetishism and Everyday Insecurity

chapter 19|22 pages

Situated Ignorance and State Terrorism

Silences, W.M.D., Collective Amnesia, and the Manufacture of Fear