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Vancouver as the centre of the world
No, I know it isn’t – though many people who live here evidently think otherwise – but on the first full day of the London Olympics it seems appropriate to re-visit Landon Mackenzie’s Vancouver as the...
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Bombing Encyclopedia of the World
Bombing from the air re-wrote the geography of war, blurring and blasting the boundaries between ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ spaces. But it also required a knowledge of geography. In the Second World...
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Theory of the drone 10: Killing at a distance
This is the tenth in a series of extended posts on Grégoire Chamayou‘s Théorie du drone and covers the fifth and final chapter in Part II, Ethos and psyche. Chamayou begins with a lecture given by...
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Biometric war
The US military’s obsession with biometrics is, in part, the product of its phantasmatic desire to make the battlespace fully transparent, as its incorporation within the targeting cycle makes clear:...
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Drones, battlefields and later modern war
This morning the Stimson Center issued an 81-page Recommendations and Report of the Task Force on US Drone Policy: you can access it online via the New York Times here or download it as a pdf here;...
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Darkness Descending
I woke this morning to media reports of the continued carnage in Gaza and to headlines recycled from Associated Press announcing that Israel had struck ‘symbols of Hamas power’. Front and centre in...
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Legitimate targets?
I’ve been thinking about the description of Gaza as a space of exception in my last post, and I will elaborate (and qualify) that discussion shortly: in many ways the Israeli offensive against Gaza...
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A short history of schematic bodies
While I was in Irvine last month for the Secrecy and Transparency workshop, I had a series of rich conversations with Grégoire Chamayou — who also made a brief but brilliant presentation on targeting,...
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Intelligence designed
The latest issue of Limn is on ‘The total archive‘: Vast accumulations of data, documents, records, and samples saturate our world: bulk collection of phone calls by the NSA and GCHQ; Google, Amazon...
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Flying lessons
To complement the comparison implicit in my last post – between ‘manned’ and ‘unmanned’ military violence – I’ve added a presentation to those available under the DOWNLOADS tab. I prepared it last...
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War crimes
In my preliminary commentary on the US military investigation into the air strike on MSF’s trauma centre in Kunduz in October 2015 – and I’ll have much more to say about that shortly – I circled...
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Those who don’t count and those who can’t count
An excellent article from the unfailing New York Times in a recent edition of the Magazine: Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal on ‘The Uncounted‘, a brilliant, forensic and – crucially – field-based...
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Ground Truth
I’m just back from an invigorating conference on ‘The Intimacies of Remote Warfare’ at Utrecht – more on this shortly – and it was a wonderful opportunity to meet old friends and make new ones. Chris...
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In my crosshairs
Two new books on the military gaze: First, from the ever-interesting Roger Stahl: Through the Crosshairs: War, Visual Culture, and the Weaponized Gaze (Rutgers). Now that it has become so commonplace,...
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