Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence

"Violent Geographies is essential to understanding how the politics of fear, terror, and violence in being largely hidden geographically can only be exposed in like manner. The 'War on Terror' finally receives the coolly critical analysis its ritual invocation has long required." —John Agnew, Professor of Geography, UCLA "Urgent, passionate and deeply humane, Violent Geographies is uncomfortable but utterly compelling reading. An essential guide to a world splintered and wounded by fear and aggression—this is geography at its most politically engaged, historically sensitive, and intellectually brave." —Ben Highmore, University of Sussex "This is what a ‘public geography’ should be all about: acute analysis of momentous issues of our time in an accessible language. Gregory and Pred have assembled a peerless group of critical geographers whose essays alter conventional understandings of terror, violence, and fear. No mere gazetteer, Violent Geographies shows how place, space and landscape are central components of the real and imagined practices that constitute organised violence past and present. If you thought terror, violence, and fear were the professional preserve of security analysts and foreign affairs experts this book will force you to think again." —Noel Castree, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University "A studied, passionate and moving examination of the way in which the violent logics of the ‘War on Terror’ have so quickly shuttered and reorganized the spaces of this planet on its different scales. From the book emerges a critical new cartography that clearly charts an archipelago of a large multiplicity of ‘wild’ and ‘tamed’ places as well as ‘black holes’ within and between which we all struggle to live." —Eyal Weizman, Director, Goldsmiths College Centre for Research Architecture

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction 2. Bare Life, Political Violence and the Territorial Structure of Britain and Ireland 3. ‘An Unrecognizable Condition Has Arrived’: Law, Violence and the State of Exception in Turkey 4. Cosmopolitanism’s Collateral Damage: The State-Organzied Racial Violence of World War I and the War on Terror 5. Refuge or Refusal: The Geography of Exclusion 6. Imperialism Imposed and Invited: The "War on Terror" Comes To Southeast Asia 7. ‘Spaces of Terror and Fear on Colombia’s Pacific Coast: The Armed Conflict and Forced Displacement Among Black Communities 8. Fatal Transactions, Conflict Diamonds and the (Anti)Terrorist Consumer 9. The Geography of Hindu Right-Wing Violence in India 10. Revolutionary Islam: A Geography Of Modern Terror 11. Vanishing Points: Law, Violence and Exception in the Global War Prison 12. Groom Lake and the Imperial Production of Nowhere 13. Targeting the Inner Landscape 14. Immaculate Warfare? The Spatial Politics of Extreme Violence 15. ‘The Pentagon’s Imperial Cartography: Tabloid Realism and the War on Terror 16. Demodernizing By Design: Everyday Infrastructure and Political Violence 17. The Terror City Hypothesis 18. Banal Terrorism: Spatial Fetishism and Everyday Insecurity 19. Situated Ignorance and State Terrorism: Silences, W.M.D., Collective Amnesia and the Manufacture of Fear

About the Author :
Derek Gregory is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. He taught for many years at Cambridge before moving to UBC, and is the author of numerous books: Ideology, Science, and Human Geography(1978); Regional Transformations and IndustrialRevolution (1982); Geographical Imaginations (1994); TheColonial Present (Blackwell, 2004); and the forthcomingDancing on the Pyramids (U of Minnesota Press, 2005). He is also co-editor of all four editions of the Dictionaryof Human Geography (Blackwell) and is currently the co-editor of the journal Society and Space. Allan Pred is Professor of Geography at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of a very large number of books, with two published by Harvard, one by Cambridge, one by Minnesota, one by California, and one by Routledge.

Review :
"Violent Geographies is...a much needed volume that focuses on the many forms and victims of terrorism and defines terror (whether perpetuated by states or nonstate actors) as a form of calculated political action with defined goals. In demonstrating the ability and desire of geographers to analyze and critique contemporary political violence, this book is most effective and a vital contribution." -- Colin Flint, Annals of the Association of American Geographers