ABSTRACT
Acts of violence at the scale of warfare have recently increased in clashes between “the West” and “the Middle East,” a phenomenon infamously predicted by Samuel P. Huntington in his internationally excoriated thesis. 1 This violence continues to produce new landscapes from Afghanistan to Manhattan. Of course, these are not the carefully planned landscapes normally evaluated in scholarly journals or lauded for their design features; neither are these the haphazard accretions of the everyday landscape typically investigated by cultural geographers. Nevertheless, new landscapes of devastation continue to emerge in the contemporary world. We should not ignore them simply due to their disturbing nature. Indeed, “the landscape of devastation is still a landscape” writes Susan Sontag, and as she convincingly argues, their investigation remains a moral imperative for politically engaged individuals. 2
