Book Review: A Research Agenda for Military Geographies
A Research Agenda for Military Geographies
Edited by: Rachel Woodward
Elgar, 2019,
ISBN 9781786438867, 215pp
Reviewed by: Major Cate Carter
Military geography uses tools and techniques of the discipline of geography to solve military problems. In essence, it studies military operations through a geographic lens. As the editor of this volume, herself a leader in military geography, tells us, ‘military geographies invite study at scales from the global and international, through the national and regional, to specific urban areas or rural localities, through to the distinctively local and individual’. It is indeed a rich and fascinating area of inquiry.
The book consists of 13 chapters, written mainly by American and British scholars but with welcome contributions from researchers in Canada, South Africa and Singapore. It is the work of these last two authors that I read first, and that I think will strike a particular resonance with Australian Army readers. Chih Yuan Woon’s chapter, ‘Towards an Everyday Military Geography: Materialities, Actors, Practices’, uses the Armed Forces of the Philippines and a case study of military intervention in Mindanao to observe military civilian interactions involving local communities. Woon uses examples of ‘everyday’ encounters between soldiers, locals, objects and spaces to break down the way the military is seen as a homogenous and sometimes threatening force into one which instead represents the agency of individual soldiers. The author specifically focuses on the activities of the soldiers of Eastern Mindanao Command in locating their peace-building activities in the homes, villages and children’s spaces of Mindanao.
In a chapter titled, ‘Spirituality and African Military Geography: Soldiers’ Deployments’, Edmore Chitukutuku and Godfrey Maringira write about the way that soldiers of the Zimbabwe National Army engage with their landscapes of deployment. They argue that in the African context, ‘military geography is also understood as being concerned with phenomena that we cannot see, that we have not heard and cannot be touched’. In their study, the authors explain how the Zimbabwe guerrilla fighters’ spiritual understanding of the landscape (to which the fighters attribute their success in the War of Liberation) has been passed down to the members of the new Zimbabwe National Army who ‘evoke and engage with ancestors … in their engagement with landscapes of deployment so that they can live safely and operate in it’. The authors offer examples of the kinds of control the invisible terrain has over soldiers, in captivating stories of prohibited places, places where fires could not be lit, meaning associated with certain animals, and protection rituals carried out by ZNA Commanders. As one ZNA Lance Corporal reports: ‘Here in Africa, we are not only faced with our guns and other war artillery when out there in the bush but we are also fighting against spirits and principalities of darkness, which dwell in these landscapes.’
Continuing the theme of ‘places with attributed meaning’ is Brittany Meché’s chapter on the deserts of the African Sahel (the countries bordering the Southern Sahara). Meché asks why arid spaces have become targets for military governance and promoted in colonial and orientalist terms as harsh, inhospitable and ‘inherently dangerous’. The Sahel, she claims, has become ‘a type of security laboratory where a number of powerful states and international organizations experiment with forms of intervention at multiple scales’. This thought-provoking chapter discusses the way development information is ‘repackaged’ as a security threat and promptly given a military solution. The author warns that such practices will only exacerbate climate change driven conflict in the future.
Other chapters include accounts of ways in which military activities interact with the law, genocide, nuclear warfare, economics, aerial spaces, theatre, military masculinities, and environmental politics. Some are exceedingly readable for people unfamiliar with the subject (bravo Craig Jones (law) and Matthew Kearns (military masculinities)!); others are less accessible. However, only the most dedicated student of military geography needs to read the whole book. Everyone else should take the chapters that relate to their field of interest, apply the ideas to an Australian setting and start a conversation with those scholars to incorporate a military geographical perspective into their work!
The final chapter, however, is a must read. Matthew Rech and Richard Yarwood imagine post-military geographies—spaces which have been uncoupled from their military origins and roles. They do this through an ethnographic commentary of their visit to Plymouth at the UK public celebration known as ‘Armed Forces Day’. Drawing on Martin Shaw’s 1991 book Post-Military Society, the authors consider the continuation of the post-Cold War practice of restructuring social and cultural life from a 20th century military society to one in which military workforces and infrastructure transition to civilian use. At a time when we are caught between post-war transition of veterans and calls to mobilise the citizenry and Reserve, such ideas are indeed timely. This collection of diverse military scholarship is essential mind-broadening reading for all current military practitioners and scholars.
