On war (and geography):Engaging with an environmental frontier

摘要

Warfare and geography have a close historical association. Lacoste (1973) observed that geography 'as a concise method of describing space, both in human and physical characteristics... [historically] became transposed into terms amenable to management... social organization and control, and [to] warfare' (Lacoste, 1973:1). In its earliest incarnation, geography was in practice a subject directly linked to military and political activities;from the early 20th century onwards the linkages between geographical studies and military activities have been reworked and reframed - geography as a 'tool' to facilitate the planning and execution of warfare has been replaced by the ideological, with war (and peace) focused geographers examining the geopolitics of warfare to explore, explain, address or mitigate conflict and its human impacts (e.g. Gregory, 2010;Lacoste, 1973;Le Billon and Cervantes, 2009;Wisner, 1986). The disciplinary legacy of warfare remains in the subdiscipline of 'military geography', whichWoodward (2005:720) defines as 'the application of geographical tools and techniques to the solution of military problems', but this is not as simple as the waging of war, and there is a range of activities that relate directly or indirectly to active warfare, most of which require a geographical perspective. Today, 'geographical' explorations of warfare remain almost entirely the preserve of human geography.