War/law/space notes toward a legal geography of war

Abstract

To some degree war has always entailed its rhetorics of justification and regimes of authorization. Today, however, war and law have become inseparable; now more than ever, war requires a legal armature to secure its legitimacy and organize its conduct. Our introduction (and the special issue more broadly) investigates this lethal conjunction of law and war across space and time. To capture the interplay of war, law and space-time, we conceive them as forming a kind of nexus or set of entanglements. Adapting legal geographer Nick Blomley’s (1989) concept of the “law-space nexus”, we call this the war/ law/space nexus. Our discussion highlights some of its main features and introduces the subsequent papers that make up this special issue.