Intimacy-Geopolitics, Remote Warfare and Domestic Violence: Disrupting Hierarchies of Violence

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using intimacy-geopolitics as its framework, this paper examines multi-sited violences enabled by digital technologies as interwoven forms of remote warfare. As political geographers have highlighted the ‘trickling down’ of digital weapons technologies from military to police practice, this analysis has tended to stop at the scale of the state. We extend this work by examining technology-enabled coercive control (TECC) within the context of domestic violence through the lens of remote warfare. TECC includes the way abusers use digital technologies to surveil, track, monitor, harass and terrorise their intimate partners. In examining TECC through the lens of remote warfare, this paper contributes to geographic literature by illustrating the common tools and tactics that the military, police and domestic violence abusers use to engage in political violence across sites and scales. We also emphasise the way survivors feel and experience TECC in order to illustrate the intimate emotional dynamics of political violence enabled by digital technologies. We argue that centring intimacy in this way helps to expose how control and domination work within remote warfare – at all scales.