Moving targets and violent geographies 1 Derek Gregory Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies University of British Columbia, Vancouver Modern war has always been a moving target. The trajectory from total war in Europe and beyond in 1914-1918 through what James Gibson calls America’s ‘technowar’ in South East Asia in the 1960s and 70s to what I have called ‘the everywhere war’ in the early twenty-first century reveals an extraordinary series of transformations in the nature and very meaning of war. 2 And yet, for all these convulsions, there is also an enduring sameness about modern war. Even as we are assured that later modern war has succeeded in limiting combatant and civilian casualties through its new modes of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), new weapons systems, and new modes of accountability, and even as new systems of medical evacuation and advances in military medicine have enabled the injured to survive wounds that in the past would surely have killed them, military violence continues to be registered on the frail, fleshy human body. The intimate dialectic between the political technology of war and the human body was recognised by Walter Benjamin – one of Allan Pred’s most vital sources of political and intellectual inspiration – in 1936. The storm clouds were already gathering over Europe, but Benjamin noted that a process set in train during the First World War had not halted: ‘Wasn’t it noticeable at the end of the war that men who returned from the battlefield had grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was
1 I am extremely grateful to Trevor Barnes, Craig Jones and Michael Smith for their comments on a draft of this essay.