War Beyond the Battlefield

This book aims to produce alternative ways to think the geographies and spaces of the War on Terror, as well as the practices of warfare and their impacts that make up the War on Terror. It has thus deliberately avoided treating the conventional analysis of war on the battlefield or its visuality of the battlefield and rather sought to make war beyond the battlefield visible by addressing the materiality of conflict and war that can be revealed beyond the battlefield.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

In an effort to make sense of war beyond the battlefield in studying the wars that were captured under the rubric of the "War on Terror", this special issue book seeks to explore the complex spatial relationships between war and the spaces that one is not used to thinking of as the battlefield. It focuses on the conflicts that still animate the spaces and places where violence has been launched and that the war has not left untouched. In focusing on war beyond the battlefield, it is not that the battlefield as the place where war is waged has gone in smoke or has borne out of importance, it is rather the case that the battlefield has been dis-placed, re-designed, re-shaped and rethought through new spatializing practices of warfare. These new spaces of war – new in the sense that they are not traditionally thought of as spaces where war takes place or is brought to – are television screens, cellular phones and bandwidth, George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, videogames, popular culture sites, news media, blogs, and so on. These spaces of war beyond the battlefield are crucial to understanding what goes on the battlefield, in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in other fronts of the War on Terror (such as the homeland) – to understand how terror has globally been waged beyond the battlefield.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Geopolitics.