Geography, military geography, and critical military studies

Abstract

This paper is about the distinctive contributions which contemporary military geography might make to the wider critical military studies project. The paper notes the relative absence of the study of military topics across Anglophone human geography in the second half of the twentieth century, and the resurgence of interest in the spatialities of militarism and military activities over the past decade or so in tandem with the emergence of critical geography. The paper then goes on to examine three key tropes of geographical inquiry to illustrate how a critical military studies alert to spatiality might develop further. These are geography’s rich tradition of research and writing about landscape, geography’s engagement with concepts of representation, and geography’s theorizing on scale. The paper argues that a geographically informed critical military studies can be illuminating on matters of war and militarism because of its attention to the located, situated, and constitutive natures of military power and its effects. The paper concludes with a reflexive commentary on what critical military studies might take from ongoing debates in human geography about the necessity of engagement and co-inquiry with research subjects, when a focus on military topics raises ethical questions about collaboration. We argue that transparency, accountability, and awareness of the multiple and complex politics of academic inquiry are necessarily part of the wider critical military studies project.