Abstract
Where does war take place? This benign question and the constellation of concerns that it raises lie at the centre of Spaces of War, War of Spaces, a collection of chapters edited by Sarah Maltby, Ben O’Loughlin, Katy Parry and Laura Roselle. In its introduction, Ben O’Louglin and Laura Roselle respond to the common-sense understanding of war as something that takes place in the narrowly conceived geography of the battlefield, beginning with the observation that spaces of war are far more distributed than the foreign geographies (for some assumed centre) of contemporary conflict. Rather, the social, political and physical spaces occupied by war and its attendant infrastructure are widely dispersed in material and semiotic spaces far from the frontlines.
The book explores this phenomenon in two parts. In its first half, ‘Spaces of War’, it focuses on how media create and sustain spaces of war. Six chapters examine how war is situated spatially and temporally and linked with (or kept apart from) other spaces. Questions of the construction and concealment of war – as somebody’s war, as being war in and of a particular place, for example – are of particular interest here. In Chapter 1, ‘War Art, Digital Media and the Audience Encounter’, Jane Quinn examines the phenomenon of ‘war art’ (p. 13) and its transformation in a time of digital media. What happens when encounters with the audience can no longer be controlled and curated as they were before, how do artists navigate new potentials between journalism, art and the politics of war? In Chapter 2, ‘The Cadastral: Towards a Visual Forensics of In/Visible Spaces of War’, Nicolette Barsdorf-Liebchen explores approaches to mapping war and its infrastructure as a political intervention that might illustrate the complicated interdependence between recognisable spaces of war and the banal infrastructure of everyday life. From rendition flights taking place at the next boarding gate over, to torture and rendition in nondescript lettings in unremarkable European towns, fixing the coordinates of war in bureaucratic, commercial and other space exposes a more historical trajectory of war as a government-corporate-bureaucratic phenomenon.
Rhys Crilley and Precious Chatterje-Doody investigate how Russian state media organisation RT (Russia Today) makes use of different genres of video to evoke different affective investments, in Chapter 3, ‘Digital Spaces of War: Genre and Affective Investments in RT’s Representations of the Syrian Conflict’. They observe that it is not simply the case that conflict actors produce representations, but that audiences themselves engage both affectively and practically with these representations to co-create the conflicts themselves. In Chapter 4, ‘Conspiracy and the Epistemological Challenges of Mediatized Conflict’, Eileen Culloty looks at reporting on the gas attacks at Ghouta and Khan Sheikhoun and the dynamics of conspiracy thinking, arguing that the speed at which digital reporting is able to stabilise accounts of such events lags behind the rapid dispersion of uncertainty and conspiracy-amenable interpretations. Shifting the focus to militaries themselves, Kevin Foster explores the challenges posed in seeing digital media as a part of the contemporary battlespace, in Chapter 5, ‘Command and Control Meet the Decentralised Network: Conventional Militaries, Social Media and the Information Environment’. The chapter asks why non-state actors have been especially skilled in using digital media, locating an explanation in the organisational structures of different types of armed forces and describing key transformations in the role of media as a part of warfighting along the way. The first half of the book closes out with Sean Aday’s Chapter 6, ‘The Myth of a Thousand Westerns: Media and Just War Theory’, exploring the ways in which institutions of the US media tend to bias reporting on the country’s wars in the interests of promoting it as a virtuous actor, 'fighting virtuous wars virtuously’ (p. 124).
In its second half, ‘War of Spaces’, the book shifts to conversations about what happens in spaces (politically, socially, semiotically) when they become tangled up in being part of where ‘war’ lives. In Chapter 7, ‘Liminality, Gendering and Syrian Alternative Media Spaces’, Dina Matar and Kholoud Helmi recount the example of Syrian alternative media platform Enab Baladi as an example of the emergence of feminist and women’s networks into the digital media ‘spaces’ made available by the war. Through the case of Enab Baladi, they explore the conflicting imaginations of the ‘modern woman’ and the politics of resisting a return to patriarchal norms that characterise this process of emerging. In Chapter 8, ‘#Shaheed: a Metaphotographic Study of Kashmir’s Insurgency (2014–2016)’, Nathaniel Brunt recounts how representations of martyrs (shaheed) in the region up-end (Western) photographic distinctions between professionals and amateurs, and between produced and everyday content. He reflects on the role of metaphotography – in which the ‘photographer’ rather ‘acts as a [. . .] sieve, straining out important fragments from the constant flow of [. . .] imagery’ (p. 165) and the ways in which such images act to counter dehumanising representations of martyrs circulating outside Kashmir. Melanie Friend, in Chapter 9, presents ‘The Plain (a Photographic Work in Progress)’ – a project interested in the space of Salisbury Plain and the ambivalent politics entailed in being one of the major training/staging grounds for the UK military. Simultaneously a military, civilian and environmental space, the project explores what a ‘war of spaces’ might look like as different realities work out their relationship to one another.
Shifting location to the fairs at which arms merchants put out their stalls, Chapter 10, ‘This Is Not a Bomb: Matériel Culture and the Arms Trade’ by Jill Gibbon reflects on the semiotic effects of the corporate gifts handed out by weapons manufacturers. From grenade-shaped stress balls to sweets and disabled bullets, she asks whether the work of these ‘seductive objects’ (p. 193) might be countered through repositioning them in (potentially) unsympathetic contexts, inspired by Dadaist approaches. Disconcertingly, she suggests that the objects survive these tactics, remaining as symbols that lead us away from thinking of the harms that actual bombs and bullets inflict. In Chapter 11, ‘Dialogic Spaces in the Situation of Conflict: Stepping Stones and Sticking Points’, Liudmila Voronova asks about the spaces that exist for dialogue in situations of armed conflict, through an examination of the experiences of Russian and Ukranian journalists encountering one another. She points to the challenge of converting monologic spaces in conflict into dialogic ones, arguing that the co-produced media products that come from these efforts serve not only journalists, but open up the possibility for audiences to take up dialogic relationships to each other. Finally, in Chapter 12, ‘Perfect War and Its Contestations’, Jolle Demmers, Lauren Gould and David Snetselaar discuss the politics of Airwars’ attempts to hold US forces accountable for the effects of their bombing campaigns through claims made within a depoliticised ‘politics of numbers’ (p. 240). They caution, however, that while digital surveillance and related methods may allow challenging US casualty numbers, this may come at risk of being drawn into the politics of knowledge production in ways that might ultimately co-opt critiques of war into a conversation in which war is no longer questioned except in matters of its perfectibility.
The book closes out with Sarah Maltby and Katy Parry adding concluding remarks. They reflect on the importance of space and time and their relationship to war, pointing out that time gives spaces the quality of being always ‘in process’ – inheriting the history of what came before and setting conditions for what comes next. Nowhere is ever wholly new, and its trajectory never wholly determinate. In reflecting on the book, they mark four kinds of spaces through which the previous chapters have led their discussions: the institutional, public, resistant and ambivalent spaces, with its own logics, metaphors and politics. Finally, they point to the ‘decorporealisation’ of war, asking where the fact of bodies in war has gone. The presence of bodies in war, they argue, has been denied, or rather, bodies have become only vehicles for other concerns (of technology, biology, civics). Yet bodies enter spaces of war to do political work grounded (in part) in the experience of violence, leaving traces in those places.