Nonkilling Geography

Nonkilling Geography Edited by James Tyner and Joshua Inwood Center for Global Nonkilling CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 You are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit this work* Under the following conditions: Attribution. You must attribute this work in the manner specified by the author/licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform or build upon this work. * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. * Any of the above conditions can be waived if you gain permission from the copyright holders. Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the Authors’ moral and legal rights. Parts of this volume have been released under GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 as part of Wikiversity’s School of Nonkilling Studies (http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/School:Nonkilling_studies). The Center for Global Nonkilling does not necessarily endorse the views expressed by the authors. Also available for free download at: http://www.nonkilling.org © The Authors, 2011 © Center for Global Nonkilling, 2011 (this edition) First Edition: June 2011 ISBN-13 978-0-9822983-9-8 ISBN-10 0-9822983-9-0 ____________________________________________________ Cataloging in Publication Data (CIP) Nonkilling Geography / Edited by James Tyner and Joshua Inwood ISBN 978-0-9822983-9-8 1. Nonkilling 2. Peace. 3. Pacifism – Nonviolence. I. Title. II. Tyner, James, ed. lit. III. Inwood, Joshua, ed. lit. CDU - 172.4 : 327.36 ____________________________________________________ A catalogue record is also available from the Library of Congress. Center for Global Nonkilling Post Office Box 12232 Honolulu, Hawaiʻi 96828 United States of America Email: [email protected] http://www.nonkilling.org “…there is no need for wars or violence… There are no problems that cannot be solved around a table…” Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 1989. Contents An Introduction to Nonkilling Geographies 11 James Tyner and Joshua F.J. Inwood Toward a Nonkilling Geography 23 James Tyner Geography as Enabler of a Killing World 43 Colin Flint Killing for Liberalism 55 Nik Heynen and Graham Pickren The Territories of “Civility” and Killing in Brazil 67 Alcindo José de Sá The New Military Urbanism 85 Stephen Graham American Exceptionalism, Abolition and the Possibilities for Nonkilling Futures 103 Jenna M. Loyd Google Bombs, Warblogs, and Hacktivism 127 Barney Warf Killing with Kindness? 149 Kathryn Gillespie 7 Introduction An Introduction to Nonkilling Geographies Opening New Spaces James Tyner Kent State University Joshua F.J. Inwood University of Tennessee In April 4, 1967, one year to the day of his assassination, Dr. Martin Lu- ther King, Jr. publically denounced the war in Vietnam. It was imperative, morally and spiritually, to speak out. According to King (1986a; 231), “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” King explained that throughout his public work within the Civil Rights movement, he began to view the on-going war in Vietnam as commensurate with the entrenched poverty and racism that permeated the United States. In other words, the massive killing of Vietnam- ese by American forces occupied the same moral plane as the discrimination, exploitation, and oppression of African-Americans in the U.S. Moreover, King realized that to remain silent on the war was to betray his core values. Spe- cifically, it would be immoral to attempt to build his Beloved Community at home while ignoring the plight of Vietnamese abroad (Inwood, 2009). During his sermon, King powerfully linked the growth of militarism, ma- terialism, and racism through time and space. In so doing, he implicated wider social, religious, and academic institutions in American society as being complicit in the death and destruction that is meted out every day in the name of the American Empire. The promotion of empire, in other words, does carry a cost; most often measured in the lives of oppressed peoples of color that have the misfortune of living in those spaces deemed of strategic economic or military value by American politicians. King’s imploring of his audience to make the connection between Vietnam and the American Civil Rights movement was an attempt to connect the direct, physical violence— the killing—with the institutional and structural violence that was to founda- tional to the economic and political systems of the United States. 11 12 Nonkilling Geography Nearly a half-century later, in the shadow of innumerable interventions across the global, in the shadow of genocides and famines, in the shadow of rampant gun violence in the United States, King’s call to ‘break the silence’ looms over us in uncomfortable ways. It is again time to break the silence. Stated differently, as educators—but more immediately as citizens of the world—we have a responsibility to act to end the violence that perme- ates our culture and our institutions in ways that do not just end conflict, but also lay the foundations for a positive peace and a nonkilling society to take root. At this moment, within the United States, when a war culture so dominates geopolitical discourse, to not do something is an ultraconserva- tive response that maintains a status quo that more often than not impacts the marginalized and most vulnerable in our society most directly. To know that poverty exists, and do nothing; to know that infants and children are starving, and do nothing; to know that women are being raped and killed through organized mass violence, and do nothing, is to participate in a culture of impunity (Tyner, 2009). As Susan Opotow (1990: 3) explains, “Al- though harm that results from unconcern … may not involve malevolent in- tent, [this] can nevertheless result in exploitation, disruption of crucial ser- vices, suffering, the destruction of communities, and death.” As long as killing—and here we refer quite explicitly to the direct, physical violence of taking life—remains an organizing principle of our modern society, we can neither deny or ignore our responsibility to address the interrelationships of war, violence, and inequality and to help our students and colleagues under- stand the linkages between these seemingly intractable problems. Glenn Paige, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawai’i and the founder and Chair of the Governing Council of the Center for Global Nonkilling (formerly Center for Global Nonviolence), provides a working definition of a nonkilling society. According to Paige (2002: 1), such a society is “a human community, smallest to largest, local to global, character- ized by no killing of humans and no threats to kill; no weapons designed to kill humans and no justifications for using them; and no conditions of society de- pendent upon threat or use of killing force for maintenance or change.” This is a tall order—but certainly a laudable goal. There are some, of course, who will decry this as utopian thinking; that violence, but especially killing, is a natural part of humanity; that geopolitics requires violence. How else, it is asked, are we to stop this century’s hitlers, stalins, or pol pots? Of course, we could counter with the question of what types of society permit the emergence of these brutal rulers? Is there not space to promote a more just society—to eliminate the structural and institutional inequalities that lead to violence? An Introduction to Nonkilling Geographies 13 Glenn Paige (2002: 161) maintains that a nonkilling (and more broadly, nonviolent) society is possible—but any effort to promote such as society must be global. In other words, geography must figure prominently in such an effort. Indeed, as outlined by Paige (2002: 74-75), a beginning point in the promotion of a nonkilling society is to concentrate on the various zones—or spaces—of a nonkilling society; attention, both scholarly and po- litically, must be directed toward those spaces in which violence is (re)produced, maintained, justified, and legitimated. At a most immediate, proximate level, we must direct attention to the ‘space of killing’: the space where actual violence takes place—the space of the murderer, for example, or the rapist. These personal spaces are produced through social rela- tions and interactions; these are the spaces where men and women act. However, these spaces are themselves coded by dominant and embodied conceptions of ‘race’, sex, gender, and so on—the ‘spaces of socialization’. Here is where people learn to kill, directly by training or vicariously by ob- servation. These are the spaces in which violence is learned—and learned to be accepted. More broadly, we are confronted with the ‘spaces of cul- tural conditioning’. It is within these spaces that we observe how religion, for example, and other ideologies have provided reasons and justifications for violence more broadly and killing more specifically. We see here also the salience of media, education, and other institutions. Lastly, we need to direct attention to those ‘spaces of structural reinforcement’: the economic and political practices that permeate society, such as the promotion of capi- talism and attendant colonial and neo-colonial practices. In total, we must direct attention as to how structural and institutional violence likewise provides the context for direct, personal violence and, ultimately, killing. These spaces are not exclusive, but instead operate in tandem, produc- ing a militarized society that both condones and in fact promotes violence and killing as justifiable solutions. This is seen most clearly, but by no means solely, in the emergence of ‘war culture’. Thus, as an initial testing of the waters, of a preliminary sketch of the spaces of violence, we provide a brief narrative of war culture and militarism.

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