A genealogy of military geographies: Complicities, entanglements, and legacies

Isla Forsyth

doi:10.1111/gec3.12422

Abstract

AbstractThis paper argues that historical geography is particularly well positioned to make insightful contributions to military geographies and critical military studies more broadly because of its commitment to critically exploring the genealogies and consequences of military violence, which are too often seen as a given or historically non‐contingent. This is demonstrated by a review of existing literature which variously acknowledges the emergence of disciplinary geography in concert with the modern military, traces the contributions of geographers to and their entanglements with the military, and accounts for the complicities, consequences, and legacies of military activities and violence through a historical lens. The paper reveals how historical geography exposes the knowledges, technologies, and lives that produce and are shaped by military activities as being spatially and temporally specific. Further, it suggests future directions for historical geography that would extend and expand the discipline's attempts to more fully acknowledge the place of military geographies in our histories, politics, spatialities, cultures, and everyday lives.

Highlights

This paper argues that historical geography is well positioned to make insightful contributions to military geographies and critical military studies more broadly because of its commitment to critically exploring the genealogies and consequences of military violence, which are too often seen as a given or historically non-contingent
In order to account for the nature of state-sanctioned violence, the diverse and varied geographies of the military and the militarism of space must be examined, and further, the historical geographies of these need to be used to situate and hold accountable contemporary geopolitics and violence
Rech et al (2015) have argued that the sub-discipline of military geography has a specific contribution to make to the emerging interdisciplinary project of critical military studies, which interrogate the taken-for-granted categories related to the military, militarism and militarisation

Summary

Introduction

This paper argues that historical geography is well positioned to make insightful contributions to military geographies and critical military studies more broadly because of its commitment to critically exploring the genealogies and consequences of military violence, which are too often seen as a given or historically non-contingent. They suggest that a geographically informed critical military studies can locate the situated natures of military activities, explore these as socially constituting practices, and account for the diverse range of spaces in which military activities and militarism shape and are shaped by (Rech et al 2015, 50).

Results

Conclusion