A growing literature debates the proposition that insurgency in ‘small wars' is primarily driven by opportunities to exploit or loot abundant natural resource and by feasibility factors. While recent studies on the geography of opportunity, feasibility and predation have qualified some of these broad claims, the literature is still in need of a better understanding of the micro-geographies of small wars. Through a critical discussion of this literature, I will argue for an analytics of ‘telluric geographies' that studies the geography of rule, violence and affect in small wars.
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