ABSTRACT
This chapter attends to those territorial and oppositional imaginaries which lend an uncertain form to the “violent geographies” of the Global War on Terror (GWoT), focusing particularly on the nebulous, but paradoxically central, notion of “borders” and “border security” (Gregory and Pred 2007). I discuss the co-implication of technical and conceptual fields of military transformation in composing logics of war and surveillance in diverse, but interconnected, operational theatres. And I trace out a political economy in which epistemic and techno-scientific assertions about power, morality, and difference flow through and instantiate a global cartography of permissive violence. Throughout, I suggest ways of approaching the experiences and experiments being accumulated within Israel’s military industrial complex and its battlefield laboratories. By relating these experiences to the industry’s export dynamics, particularly in relation to its centrepiece technology – the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) – I ask how (and suggest where) the specificities of Israel’s permanent war laboratories are being translated into more universal experiments in violence exercised against increasingly uncertain “combatants.”
