I’m Peter Wall Distinguished Professor and also Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. More information here.
You can contact me at derek.gregory@geog.ubc.ca
Much of my research and writing since The colonial present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004; reprinted 10 times) has concerned what I call late modern war. I’m presently working on three research/book projects:
The everywhere war: Its main focus is on US military power and violence, though there are excursions that address other advanced militaries (Britain, Israel). It’s organised around three main sections, each of which corresponds to one of the ‘performances of space’ that I discuss in much more detail in the opening essay (and in “War and peace”, Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 35 (2010) 154-86). The first, ‘Locating’, refers to the production of the space of the target, and includes essays on targeting on the ground and from the air and maps the transition from deliberative to dynamic targeting and from an object-ontology to an event-ontology. The second, “Inverting’, refers to the production of the space of the enemy Other, and includes essays on Orientalism, the cultural turn and counterinsurgency and on the biopolitics of Baghdad. The third, ‘Excepting’, refers to the production of the legal-lethal space of the exception, and includes essays on Guantanamo, Bagram and the global war prison. Taken together, L-I-E provides a sharp acronym… The final essay, ‘The everywhere war’, provides a complementary characterisation of late modern war through discussions of the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands, the US-Mexico border, and cyberspace. Original versions of many of these essays are available under the DOWNLOADS tab, but I’m radically revising them for the book.
Killing Space: This is a study of the histories/geographies of bombing, focusing on three main campaigns: the combined bomber offensive against Germany in World War II, the US air wars over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and the ‘drone wars’ over Afghanistan-Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. The original research proposal, together with some essays from the project, are available under the DOWNLOADS tab.
Deadly embrace: war, distance and intimacy: This had its origins in my British Academy Lecture in March 2012, and is rapidly taking on a life of its own. Contemporaries often claim that one of the diagnostics of contemporary warfare is its capacity to inflict military violence from a distance – and yet, while the modalities for doing so have undoubtedly changed, the capacity to wage war over a distance has a much longer history (and a much more complicated geography). Here I focus on information (how publics are informed about distant wars waged in their name); intelligence (how states and their militaries know the enemy and the battlespace); logistics (how people and materials are transported to and from war zones); and weapons (the changing range over which violence is inflicted).
Most of the postings on this blog flow from these projects, but I do address other themes and topics from time to time.
I am glad I’ve found your blog. I am doing a MA in Humanitarian Action and your blog looks like an interesting source of information and critical thinking. Very interesting blog. :)
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good to be back in touch, and able to keep up with UBC’s intellectual core of critical geographies
Do you have a publisher for your book The Everywhere War yet? I’ve been searching online but can’t seem to find any reference to it as a book. Thanks!