The territorial integrity of Iraq, 2003–2007: Invocation, violation, viability

Abstract

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“Protest is Just a Click Away!” Responses to the 2003 Iraq War on a Bulletin Board System in China

“…Indeed, as the following analysis exemplifies, the tropes used by the US to justify hegemonic, unilateral interventions in Iraq appeal to these precise aforementioned conceptions of`just war'. I argue that it is crucial to look at how the Bush Administration nullifies the seemingly opposing tendencies of two geographical tenets to shape dominant imag(in)ings of an Iraq war waged for justice and morality: the extraterritorial reach of the US in its need to attack another sovereign state on one hand and the subscription to the logic of sovereign territory on the other (cf Elden, 2005;Elden and Williams, 2009).…”

A crisis in aerial sovereignty? Considering the implications of recent military violations of national airspace

“…However, actions taken by a number of states have raised questions about the extent to which this concept is being rendered in two with territorial sovereignty being violated at the same time that territorial preservation is being invoked, resulting in the existing territorial extent of states becoming disconnected from their supposedly sovereign rights within these boundaries. At the heart of this have been conflicts where powerful states have intervened militarily to prevent the exercise of sovereignty of weaker states, whilst at the same time continually citing (and siting) the geographical fixedness of the international state system (see Elden and Williams 2009).…”

“…Violations of territorial integrity are more accurately violations of the territorial sovereignty of a state whilst, as Elden (2005b 2006) and Elden and Williams (2009) have argued, the invading state continues to invoke the territorial preservation of the state as part of the raison d'être for its actions. Thus, the violation of a state's territorial integrity through the use of air power rests on multiple actions undertaken by aggressors over a period of time or through the imposition of legal regimes that remove the ability of the effected state to practice sovereignty over its airspace.…”

“…The imposition and policing of these zones clearly violated Iraq's territorial integrity for over a decade, preventing the Iraqi state from exercising sovereign control over the full extent of its territorial space. At the same time, US and UK rhetoric continued to make use of the UN Mandate to argue that the no‐fly zones were preventing the disintegration of Iraq, thus invoking Iraq's territorial integrity as its preservation (see Williams 2007; Elden and Williams 2009).…”

“…Under international law a state's sovereignty expands to encompass the totality of its horizontal territorial extent stretching between its internationally recognised boundaries. National airspace extends horizontally between the international land or maritime boundaries of every state, and vertically from the ground to the limits of the atmosphere (see FAI geography perspective is significant, and necessary, because it provides the ability to conceptualise sovereign territory as a three-dimensional volumetric space encompassing the land, maritime and air spaces of a state, extending understandings beyond its rather more traditionally constructed two-dimensional plane (see Elden 2005a, 8;2009).…”