The geontological time-spaces of late modern war

Abstract

Attending to connections between serious health conditions (cancers and congenital disorders) and weapons residues in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza, this article develops a geographical agenda for examining power in late modern war from the perspective of the ground and the life it sustains. A case is made for understanding the time-spaces of war as not compressed, vertical or remote but enduring, pedospheric and proximate in which violence emerges through processes (carcinogenic and teratogenic) that transcend boundaries between ‘life’ ( bios) and ‘nonlife’ ( geos). Such are the geontological time-spaces of late modern war that geographers – in both ‘physical’ and ‘human’ sub-fields – are uniquely equipped to examine.

Atmospheric negations: Weaponising breathing, attuning irreducible bodies

“…While the latter incapacity (to orchestrate bodies through atmospheric configurations) was shown to remain entwined to bodily irreducibility and the vanishing compositions of groundless air, such negative understanding of sphere-dwelling can also open up new avenues for thinking corporeality and material environments in relation to disruptions, amputations and disorientations associated with colonial, capitalist, racial, imperial, ecological and technological weaponisation of aerial toxicities, atmospheric threats, and hostile attunements (e.g. Griffiths, 2022; Nieuwenhuis, 2016; Sharpe, 2016). In doing so, they can further bridge recent debates in cultural geography (e.g.…”

“…Here we are not only witnessing a slow atmospheric violence that ‘wears down and out’ people (Harker, 2020: 161) with enduring ‘vulnerabilities’ (Joronen 2021), ‘environmental damage’ (Amira, 2021) ‘material toxicities’ (Griffiths, 2022), and forms of ‘dispossession’ (Sa’di-Ibraheem, 2020); here we are also getting a sense of how the colonial violence operates through spheres that are both aerial and intimate in nature. Nadine further highlighted this through different positionalities between herself and her mother-in-law:the place where I grew up is not far away, but soldiers have only once invaded my family house, during the second Intifada.…”

“…Such material and embodied understanding of atmospheric proximity thus helps in acknowledging manifold ways of weaponising the air through the necessity of the body to breathe in its aerial surroundings (Sloterdijk, 2009a), but importantly, also in avoiding masculine, techno-and Eurocentric remoteness that many (e.g. Griffiths, 2022;Harker, 2014) have seen problematic to works elaborating aerial violence through its volumetric and vertical dimensions (cf. Adey, 2010;Weizman, 2007).…”

Gaza: A decolonial geography

“…Across this work, a detailed picture of spatial segregation emerges, or specifically how colonial space is multiple and mutable. Depending on which parts of Palestine they live in, Palestinians are severely restricted in movement (Griffiths & Repo, 2020, 2021; Hammami, 2015, 2019; Rijke & Minca, 2018, 2019; Tawil‐Souri, 2009, 2017); facing forced displacements and demolitions of their homes (Harker, 2009; Joronen & Griffiths, 2019; Shalhoub‐Kevorkian, 2009); under the surveillance of settler civil society (Griffiths, 2023; Medien, 2023); caught within uncertain bureaucratic and juridical processes (Berda, 2017; Joronen, 2017b); military practices of (non) ‘ethical’ operations (Jones, 2023; Puar, 2017); de‐development (Roy, 1999; Smith, 2016); infrastructure and practices of urban land grabbing (Alkhalili, 2017a, 2017b; Alkhalili et al., 2014; Joudah, 2020; Porter & Yiftachel, 2017; Salamanca & Silver, 2022); an assault on the animating function of hope and future (Abu Hatoum, 2021; Amir, 2021; Hassouna, 2024; Meneley, 2021); the more‐than‐human geographies of subjugation (Bishara et al., 2021; Braverman, 2021, 2023; Griffiths, 2022; Joronen, 2023; Stamatopoulou‐Robbins, 2022); and a general suppression of Palestinian political and cultural expression (Alqaisiya, 2018; Järvi, 2023). If here we are reference‐heavy, it is in the service of collating reading resources that can contribute to a decolonial politics that is informed through robust geographical inquiry.…”

Reimagining landscape: Materiality, decoloniality, and creativity

“…New landscape research ranges from the long-term socio-environmental legacies and residues of ethnic conflict (Riding, 2020), to the geontological time-spaces of modern warfare (see Griffiths, 2022), to the intensifying eliminatory speed of settler-colonialism (dromoelimination) (see Ghantous and Joronen, 2022). New landscape research places colonialism, capitalism, and enduring racial hierarchies at the centre of the conversation about human-caused environmental change by returning attention to the scale of the plantation landscape as a discursive ideal (see Wolford, 2021).…”