“A Microscopic Insurgent”: Militarization, Health, and Critical Geographies of Violence

Abstract

Wars do not maim with bullets and bombs alone but cause economic and environmental destruction that leave enduring bodily harms. Preparations for war-making also cause negative health effects, from toxic waste to the redirection of social wealth from investment in social needs. The commonsense juxtaposition of exceptional war to normal peace makes it difficult to recognize processes of militarization, the violent continuities between war and peace, and geographic ties binding spaces of relative health with spaces of harms. This article advances a critical geographic analysis of violence to analyze the ways in which militarization and structural violence reinforce one another. A 2007 cholera epidemic in Iraq was militarized through material and discursive geographies of cholera and violence. Humanitarian claims to cure cholera rested on this dualistic geopolitical imagination, distorting the agents of violence and erasing the grave effects of peacetime and wartime structural violence. By situating cholera within a broader historical and geographic context that shows links between “wartime” and “peacetime” places also suffering premature deaths from the destruction or abandonment of necessary infrastructures, a critical human geography can contribute to struggles for peace and justice.