Hostile terrain: on the spatial and affective conditions for revolution

Abstract

In 1966, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara arrived in south-east Bolivia assuming that the region’s forested mountains and the poverty of the peasantry constituted ‘favourable terrain’ to start a revolution. Instead, he encountered a hostile terrain that led to the defeat of his guerrilla force and to his death. In this article, I offer a spatial and affective analysis of Guevara’s conceptualizations of ‘favourable’ and ‘unfavourable’ terrain, of his gendered experience of a ‘hostile terrain’ in Bolivia, and of how these ideas and his emphasis on revolutionary determination were subsequently debated and reformulated by guerrilla fighters and radical movements in Latin America. Drawing from an analysis of the interface between terrain, place and territory in rebellions, I show how the dichotomy between favourable and unfavourable terrain misses that spatially attuned insurrections can potentially weaponize any type of terrain, but also that they always confront a ‘hostile terrain’, understood as the social and territorial conditions that hinder their spatial proliferation. This means conceptualizing revolutions as spatial and affective processes through which determined multitudes overcome this hostility by attuning to place, empowering their strategies through engagements with different types of terrain, and expanding rebel territories. I conclude by discussing why these questions are relevant today to radical politics amid the climate crisis.