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The Space of War in Political Geography
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Lecture on using geographical concepts of space to understand the way war creates, destroys and uses space.
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The Space of WarNotes on Lecture by Dr Noam Leshem, Durham University.
Outline
• We assume that war shapes space in the most obvious of senses – it shapes
spaces through destruction. War is carried out and produces material
consequences on the ground - craters, fire etc. War shapes space.
• War is also shaped by these spatial constraints e.g., operating overseas shapes
the strategic consideration of war.
• Focus today: the intellectual and material intricacies that have shaped (since 18 th
century) the way that violent conflict is not only waged, but rather how it is more
fundamentally understood. Theorise the changes in intellectual understandings of
war.
• Modern war: power changes in the modern age and takes on new forms
(Foucault). War emerges anew in the modern era.
• Familiar prism: war is mechanised, increasingly technological.
• Unfamiliar prism: modern logics.
• Modern logics: strategies and policy making, and intellectual grounding which
must be recognised. War is not an anarchic object but adheres to a particular
logic.
• Epoch of late modern war: since the late 20th C something radical changes in the
way that we understand space, and as a result how we understand the battle
space.
Atmosphere
• WWI is the first modern war as it was the first war to have new, modern
technologies implemented in the battlefield. Industrialisation transformed war and
rational thinking through mass production.
o Violence was enacted on an industrial scale, through the use of new
mechanics.
o That combination of industrialisation of violence and the mechanisation of
conflict places WWI as a threshold of modernity in its most awful and
startling sense.
, • From the 18th Century, modernity was the age of enlightenment and discovery,
eliminating poverty and need, a breakthrough in human ‘progress’. However, WWI
used these modern elements to the most horrific consequence.
• 20th Century produced a radical shift that moved us away from the battle field to a
battle space. For example, in the medieval period there were two sides going
directly at each other. But in modernity, there is more complex space. — Sloterdijk,
P. (2022) Terror from the Air.
• The use of chemical gases was unprecedented and transformed the way that we
understand war. It is not only the deadliness of these gases (first caused were
more debilitating than deadly). Chemical weapons in the 1920s were used for pest
control e.g. cyclon D. Cyclon D was used by the Nazi’s in death camps, for the
mass and industrial killing of hundreds of people.
• Space of violence is radically transformed. Transition from the targeting - no longer
is the body of the enemy the object of war, but their environment. Gas is released
to attack the air, that the abstract body of an enemy will consume.
• Shift from battlefield to battle space = areal warfare.
• In WWI, there is the foregrounding of air power. The air becomes a sphere of
conflict in a way that it wasn’t for millennia. The ability to move through air in an
autonomous sense was a critical shift.
• The air itself was embed with a sense of dread and fear for the first time e.g. the
Blitz. Shaped a new geography of war.
• “The conquest of the third dimension by the aerial forces and the extension of
the submarine offensive gave to the Second World War its ‘volume’. What was
only yesterday the privilege of sea powers becoming the privilege of the entire
military establishment: the control of the sky completed the control of the sea's
depths… Space was at last homogenized, absolute war became a reality”
(Paul Virilio, 1994, 39–40)
• Absolute war means both intensity and a comment on the geography that is folded
into that form of conflict. War now implicates and all and every space.
• ‘Weaponising the weather’ = volumetric and atmospheric understanding of war to
weaponise weather began in 1990s. Report called ‘weather as a force multiplier’.
• “A high-risk, high-reward endeavor, weather-modification offers a dilemma not
unlike the splitting of the atom. While some segments of society will always be
reluctant to examine controversial issues such as weather-modification, the
tremendous military capabilities that could result from this field are ignored at our
own peril. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via
small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of
global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers
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