ABSTRACT
Geopolitics was much more than an arm of foreign policy and international relations; it was part and parcel of the making of national social order. The urban geographies of organized violence are not only aimed abroad but also inflict racialized military violence at home; as part of the US Military Operations in Urban Terrain(MOUT) program, the military conducts terrorizing training exercises in US cities, particularly in African-American neighbourhoods. Public attention has focused on the vulnerabilities of airports and land borders, yet it is in the ports where many key struggles over security and economy are being waged. That military service, which provides another vista on the social reach of the military, is especially revealing as regards the transformation of citizenship and social security today is hardly accidental insofar as military service was also central to nation-state formation. It was otherwise during the next wave of decolonization, the long twentieth-century march of postcolonial struggle and aspiration through Europe, Asia and Africa.
