Contested Territories
For a while I’ve wanted to do an index of wars, highlighting struggles over land. Here is a list of some ongoing struggles, although there will always be debates over what constitutes a “war” as opposed to a variety of conflicts for secession, rights, recognition and so on, such as in Chiapas, which doesn’t make the above list.
You may be asking where we’ve been since December? When blogger is slow or eats the posting, the chance to post (from an internet cafe in a remote town, or just before breakfast before the pressing concerns of the day interrupt me) passes. No web 2.0 for me at this level of reliability, thank you! OK let’s see if this publishes…
February 3rd, 2007 at 1:41 pm
here’s a nuance to note about war and territory relationships: nytimes reporter john burns, speaking on charlie rose show last week, made interesting point that, in iraq, al qaeda fighters may trade space for time: giving ground and vanishing if assailed, in expectation that time was on their side to regain ground eventually.
February 5th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Incisive comment. By contrast, notice how ’space’ is a fixed almost enclosed-sounding area and even though time shows up in the form of references to ’short-term’, it is divorced from spatiality. We’re still a way from the space of flows idea in _Space and Culture_ issue 1, back in 1997:
Colonel Chris Langton, International Institute for Strategic Studies, London, commented:
“The operation on the ground will create a space. It is critical that the force that moves into that space is not an adversary but a friendly component. So the question is: what happens next? A ’surge’ in military parlance is a short-term word, meaning it is something you do until you stabilise the situation. But there cannot be a repeat of the mistake of securing an area and then moving out. It appears the Americans want the Iraqi forces to fill the space. Are these areas of Baghdad ready for Iraqi troops? Will the insurgents move somewhere else? Will the militias fight it out? Will it spread to Basra because the [Shia] militias in Baghdad are linked to the militias in Basra?” (From the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1988741,00.html)
February 5th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
“space of flows idea” as seen in S&C issue 1? i don’t have access. may i ask you for quick elaboration? is it similar to what i’ve seen by/in castells?
i’d suppose the idea is about spaces that are defined more by flows going through them, than by fixed structures within them?
this is a back-burner interest for me, so i am far from up on thinking about it. and i’m just wandering around on it for now. but i’d like to be able toss around some ideas and observations now and then.
February 6th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
oh well. i suppose you’ve moved on. in any case, i’d note that u.s. strategy in baghdad is headed for a spatial reorientation: away from emphasis on having a big forward base from which units operate, to a new effort to establish and hold small outposts distributed beyond the central base. makes sense in principle.
strategy in all fields is an art of relating ends and means. and a lot of that is about space and time orientations. and “space” is still about “stocks” as well as “flows” in the network age.