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Abstract

This report asks what would it mean to decolonise the study of war from a geographical perspective? Section I turns to scholarship in International Relations to learn from existing approaches to decolonising war. Section II reviews some of the key feminist scholarship that has broadened war’s ontologies. Section III considers how decolonial, Black, and Indigenous geographies can further advance the decolonisation of war agenda, providing tools to better understand questions of agency, race, empire, and a civilian sense of place. The final section assesses what progress means for a sub-discipline that struggles to recognise the transformative potential of pluralist perspectives.

Keywords

black geographies decolonising feminist geography international relations indigenous geographies violence war

I Introduction

Geographers have written extensively about decolonisation and war but have only rarely considered the two together (c.f. Agha et al., 2024; Jacobsen, 2022). This report asks what would it mean to decolonise war from a geographical perspective? The question is inspired by Tarak Barkawi’s essay ‘Decolonising War’ in which he argues that our conceptualisations of war are underpinned by ‘histories and sociologies of nation-state formation in the West’ (Barkawi, 2016: 199). Barkawi’s provocation is especially important for geographers because although war as a concept has been critiqued from many perspectives within geography, International Relations scholars have broached the question of decolonising war much more explicitly (e.g. Adamson, 2020; Gani, 2021; Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2019). For Barkawi, decolonising the study of war entails critiquing the ways in which Eurocentric ideas and historiographies inform war’s categories and meanings. Since war, the fallout of war, and the decolonial imperative are critical concerns for geographers, there is a clear need to assess where each stands in relation to each other: what are the colonialities and decolonialities of geographical perspectives on war?

To address this question, I draw from feminist, Black and Indigenous geographies to further a project of decolonising the study of war. While the classical IR formulation of war as large scale armed violence may implicitly continue to structure geographical work on war, not least in terms of geographical focus – ‘the war on Gaza’ (El-Shewy et al., 2024), ‘the war in Syria’ (Hamdan, 2021), ‘the war in Ukraine’ (Lizotte, 2022; Wolfe et al., 2024) – geographers tend towards an ontology of war that is pluralistic. This is owed in large part to feminist political geography (e.g. Cuomo, 1996; Hyndman, 2004; Pain, 2015). Long-standing feminist critiques of war in and beyond Geography and IR have, in fact, gone a long way towards decolonising war even if they have not laboured under this nomenclature. Nevertheless, as I will show, geographical work on war can retain a certain coloniality, implicitly and even explicitly, thus necessitating a reflexive decolonial critical lens.

While geographers have been finding ways to work with more expansive ontologies of war, this work is seldom connected to broader decolonial agendas.¹ The question, ‘what would it mean to decolonise war?’ provokes such a connection, demanding a dual view of two vibrant but rarely intersecting areas of inquiry among geographers. Immediately to mind are issues of materiality and decolonisation – that is, that to decolonise cannot merely be an intellectual or epistemological project – and the obvious yet under-explored potentialities for scholarship that is meaningfully invested in liberation and anti-war politics (c.f. Agha et al., 2024; El-Shewy et al., 2024). As Rivera Cusicanqui reminds us: ‘There can be no discourse of decolonisation, no theory of decolonisation, without a decolonising practice’ (Cusicanqui, 2012: 100; see also: Esson et al., 2017; Tuck and Yang, 2012). Given geographers’ extensive engagement with decolonial perspectives in recent years, it would seem imperative to pursue such a decolonising practice within and through our study of war, violence, and non-violence.

This progress review is structured as follows: Section I turns to scholarship in International Relations to learn from existing approaches to decolonising the study of war. Section II reviews some of the key feminist transformations of war, focusing on the ways in which scholarship has broadened ontologies of war by de-exceptionalising its violence through a reconsideration of war’s scales, spaces, intensities, and temporalities. Section III considers how decolonial, Black, and Indigenous geographies push the decolonisation of war agenda further still, providing tools to better understand the connected questions of agency, race, empire and what I call a civilian sense of place. The final section assesses what progress might mean for a sub-discipline that has too easily dismissed pluralist perspectives.

II Decolonising the concept of war

Conventional IR theory tends to work with a normative ontology of war (c.f. Enloe, 2014; Kinsella, 2011; Peterson, 1992) but in the last decade IR scholars have sought to open the concept of war along explicitly decolonial lines (Barkawi, 2016, 2017; Howell, 2018; Singh, 2017).² At the heart of Tarak Barkawi’s decolonial inquiry, for instance, is a sense in which dominant conceptualisations of war remain structured by the colonial encounter. This is not to say that all wars are colonial – though of course much war is driven by colonialism (Gregory, 2004; Irani, 2024; Khalidi, 2024) – but rather that prevailing understandings of war as theorised from the Global North derive primarily from the Western experience. Importantly, Barkawi notes that the problem is not that conflicts in the global South are ignored, but that, ‘European histories of war provide the (provincial) basis for the putatively universal concepts and definitions with which we study war in both the global South and North’ (Barkawi, 2016: 200) and, correspondingly, that other kinds of wars lack ‘defining, ontological significance’ (Barkawi, 2016: 208). He argues, for example, that Small Wars ‘enabled world-order projects like capitalist modernity’, yet barely feature in conventional theories of war (Barkawi, 2016: 201). This is an important argument that speaks to the western-centricity of dominant European concepts of war not only in terms of ‘what wars count?’ but also ‘what counts as war?’ Barkawi’s field-defining work on decolonising the concept of must now be (re)considered in light of the now burgeoning scholarship on racial capitalism (Gilmore, 2002; Pulido, 2016; Robinson, 2020; Vasudevan and Smith, 2020) and the coloniality of power (Mignolo, 2013; Quijano, 2000, 2007) for together these concepts hold significant potential to enrich the study of war precisely because they are outside of the traditional ‘canon’ of European war literature (a point returned to in section III).³

Barkawi’s move to decolonise war relies on two principal critiques. First, he takes issue with the war/peace binary, noting that in Eurocentric thought these are sharply distinguished categories. Whether it be the vast literature in military geography (Graham, 2011; Rech et al., 2015; Woodward, 2004), or the work on the war-peace binary across political geography (Dijkema et al., 2024; Fluri, 2014, 2021: 702; Gregory, 2010; Koopman, 2011b), this critique will be familiar to political geographers. But Barkawi adds some important historical detail that has salience for geographical critiques of violence today. Drawing on the work of Hull (2006), Barkawi explicitly highlights the continuities between colonialism and war and argues that force and everyday violence (rather than war or peace) has been the ever-present feature of encounters between the global North and South since 1492. Again, political (and urban) geographers will be familiar with the language of everyday violence, but potentially productive here is a reminder to historicise and unsettle the ‘sediments of violence’ (Faria, 2017: 584) that inhere in contemporary warfare and ongoing colonial encounters (Amoore, 2009; Clayton, 2021; De Leeuw, 2016; Duffield, 2007).

Nikhil Pal Singh makes a related point in Race and America’s Long War, arguing that race and racism at home are connected umbilically to US wars abroad. In a move that echoes feminist conceptualisations of the global-intimate (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006; Pratt and Rosner, 2006), Singh suggests that ‘foreign policy and domestic politics develop in a reciprocal relationship’ (Singh, 2017: 9; see also Mitchell, 2010, 2011). These conceptual moves to decolonise war are partly about tuning into ‘“subaltern” dimensions of Western experience’ (Barkawi, 2016: 209), but they are also about realising the ‘constitutive connections’ between the global North and South – ‘histories connected by violence’ (Barkawi, 2016: 210). The centring of the analytic of empire and race in the study of war is vital, and although both IR and geography have ‘tracked how imperial projects of rule have always brought the small and the intimate into relation with the global’, to borrow from Wesley Attewell, ‘they have nonetheless shied away from explicitly engaging with empire as a discrete category of analysis’ (Attewell, 2024: 5 emphasis in original; see also Lubin and Kraidy, 2016).

In this brief overview of scholarship in IR, one that might go against the grain of the usual Progress Report in geography, it is important to note that in the discipline in which war forms the core subject of study, there is great interest in bringing together decolonial theory with the study of war, violence, and non-violence. Feminist theory for several decades and decolonial theory more recently has transformed conventional IR and thankfully at least part of the discipline has moved on from a narrow ontology of war obsessed with the idea of Democratic Peace and the quantification of Thousands of Battlefield Deaths. The disciplinary norms in IR were so rigid and unwelcoming when feminist scholars (tried to) enter the ‘Big Conversations’ in the 1990s (Charlesworth et al., 1991; Enloe, 2014; Peterson, 1992; Sylvester, 1994; Zalewski, 1995, 1996), and no doubt there remains high barriers not only for feminist thinking but pluralist perspectives more broadly, whether that be crip and queer theory or Black, indigenous, and decolonial perspectives (Ataka, 2024; Ayoub, 2022; Beier, 2005; Chipato and Chandler, 2024; Christian, 2018; Georgis and Lugosi-Schimpf, 2021; Kinsella, 2023; Kinsella and Shepherd, 2019, 2020; MacKenzie et al., 2019; Owens, 2017, 2025; Puar, 2017; Sabaratnam, 2011; Sen, 2023; Shaw, 2002; Stern, 2019; Vitalis, 2016; Weber, 2015). But some things have changed and some of what we might think of as ageographical (or even anti-geographical) IR theory has at least in part given way to a body of scholarship that is so attentive to historical and spatial context that it is all but indistinguishable from the cutting edge empirically grounded and conceptually informed work on war not only in Geography, but also other cognate disiplines like Anthropology and Sociology and many more (Aciksoz, 2020; Azzouz, 2022; Jesús et al., 2025; Li, 2019; Terry, 2017; Yonucu, 2022).⁴ Such undisciplined work is precisely what the study of war requires and our post-disciplinary intellectual imperative becomes clearer: to better understand war, a focus on coloniality and decoloniality, and on gender difference is a matter of political and ethical integrity now.

III War beyond binaries: Feminist transformations of war

One of the principal contributions of feminist thinking in Geography and IR over the last two decades has been a sustained critique of the binaries that constitute our understandings of war. By conceiving of war as existing on a continuum of violence (Cockburn, 2004), feminist approaches have ‘de-exceptionalised and de-fetishized war’ (Jacobsen, 2022: 2).

Such theorisations led to an extensive critique of the distinctions between war and peace (Gregory, 2010; Koopman, 2011b), with a key insight being that peace, even in its more positive conceptualisation, does not necessarily indicate an absence of violence (Forde, 2022; Macaspac, 2019), even less the realisation of equality and justice (Megoran et al., 2016). Several disciplines beyond Geography and IR have for some time been heeding Jenna Loyd’s cautionary insight that the ‘commonsense juxtaposition of exceptional war to normal peace makes it difficult to recognize [….] the violent continuities between war and peace’ (e.g. Das, 2006; Kennedy, 2006; Loyd, 2009: 863). But where Barkawi (2016) approaches decolonising through a history of Small Wars (e.g. Barkawi, 2016), feminist approaches have drawn more readily on plural epistemologies that place a premium less on non-European battles, and more on embodiment, experience, and gendered inequities in the exposure to everyday violence. A review of this vast literature is beyond the scope of this report, although excellent recent work captures much of what feminist approaches have brought to political geography (Amoore, 2020; Faria et al., 2020; Fluri, 2021; Mountz, 2018) and critical IR (Kinsella and Shepherd, 2019). My own more modest ambition is to draw out some of these transformative moves across two key areas: war-time and war-space.

3.1 War-time

In his book Military Legacies: A World Made by War James Tyner argued, ‘war has no end-points’ (Tyner, 2010: ix). Time is at best a leaky container for war and war-like violence and in geography temporalities of violence have been understood to be relational (Dempsey, 2020), slow (Brickell, 2024; Morgan, 2024), chronic (Ali, 2024; Pain, 2019), long (Morrissey, 2017) and enduring (Griffiths and Redwood, 2024; Harker, 2020; Jones, 2022). In one way or another, this literature refuses to understand war as an event (Cuomo, 1996), somehow fixed in time, and instead conceives of war-time expansively, that is, as an unfolding generational process. Rob Nixon’s influential Slow Violence spawned a renewed interest in the temporalities of violence in political geography (Davies, 2018; Griffiths, 2022; O’Lear, 2024), but it is worth remembering that similar critiques of ‘unseen’ and quotidien violence, especially with regard to domestic violence and other gendered and racialised forms of violence, have been made by feminists for many decades (McKittrick, 2011; Pain and Cahill, 2021; Sharpe, 2016).

Recent critical work on slow violence has focused on the Palestinian West Bank, with regimes of settler-colonial occupation theorised as a form of slow warfare (Golańska, 2023; Joronen, 2021), but the analytics of slow violence and settler colonialism have purchase in Gaza too, despite the tendency to think of the besieged territory as paradigmatic of spectacularised forms of warfare (Griffiths, 2022; Pasquetti et al., 2024).⁵ While this work has unearthed much that is creeping and everyday in the workings of violence and modes of slow death (Berlant, 2007) and injury (Davies et al., 2024; Puar, 2017), slow and fast violence are intertwined (Christian and Dowler, 2019; Pain and Cahill, 2021) and affect populations far beyond conventional ‘warzones’ (Brydolf-Horwitz, 2018; Pain, 2019; Sharp, 2022). Also vital has been the insistence that violence is keenly experienced by affected communities whether or not it makes ‘global’ headlines (Davies, 2022; Fluri and Piedalue, 2017; Mountz, 2018). Far from invisible, (slow) violence is ‘embedded and entrenched in place, lingering, extending the timeframe of targeted harm’ (Pain and Cahill, 2021: 5). Such observations are inseparable from questions of war and peace and violence flows easily across both, with time as a medium rather than an end point. As Jennifer Fluri reminds us: ‘Peace is not the opposite of war but a temporal substitute, that engages in violence by other means, that is, non-military, institutional, and structural’ (Fluri, 2021: 702; see also Idris, 2018).

Work on the temporalities of war across the social sciences has tended to identify the long term consequences of violence: the ‘aftermath’ (Nixon, 2011), ‘after-war’ (Wool, 2015), ‘afterworlds’ (Wool and Livingston, 2017) ‘enduring’ (Jones, 2022), and ‘legacies’ (Tyner, 2010). These framings imply a definite temporal origin of violence, a traceable initial blow. The aftermath may be elongated but its origins are more discreet. This literature expands the time-horizons of war in vital ways, providing among many other things a catalogue of evidence against so-called ‘precision warfare’ and its contained collateral damage, but, as Griffiths and Rubaii (2024) have argued, the focus tends to be on downstream (i.e. future) consequences. Looking to sites of extraction that make advanced military technologies possible (e.g. the mining of cobalt, tantalum, copper and uranium), they propose the idea of the ‘beforemath’ (Griffiths and Rubaii, 2024). One of the benefits of thinking through the ‘before’ of violence is that it brings different geographies and different bodies into view and casts them as part of war’s violence. Hence, those involved in the toxic mining of war minerals and materials, and the broader regimes of military production and distribution networks are to be considered subjects and sites of war, however far or dispersed they may be from kinetic military action. Seen thus, war ‘starts’ long before the missiles screech and sirens warn, dealing preliminary and prerequisite blows that might be obscured by current focus on war’s aftermaths.

Beforemaths represent a promising direction for thinking about the temporalities of war and are readily connected to longer-established work on militarisation and military geographies (Sjoberg and Via, 2010; Stavrianakis and Selby, 2012; Woodward, 2004, 2019). For example, if militarisation can be understood as ‘the preparation for and normalization and legitimation of war’ (Stavrianakis and Stern, 2018: 3), the beforemath is nested in wider ideological and societal regimes of militarisation. Work in geography has expanded ways of thinking and theorising war-time, but new concepts, language, and metaphors may be necessary to think through the temporalities of war not in terms of a before and after, but as cyclical, repetitive, habitual, or in any case non-linear. It could be that work on trauma holds potential here because trauma shatters time and meaning (Wool and Livingston, 2017), is eruptive (Mountz, 2017) and, as Rachel Pain points out, it is also ‘profoundly shaped by the cultural and structural contexts in which it is located’ (Pain, 2021: 973).

3.2 War-space

Work in feminist political geography is characterised by a re-scaling and re-spatialisation of war that seeks to redefine ontologies of war by asking what and where is war? As with work on war-time, posing such questions brings different subjectivities and spaces into view; core to feminist work has been a commitment to make political those subjectivities and spaces that have historically been considered somehow outside of or beyond war (Sharp, 2021). One of the first conceptual moves, drawing on Marston’s (2000) influential work on the social construction of scale, was to theorise war as both international and intimate, near and far, and to insist upon the co-constitution of what had hitherto been seen as two different types of violence – warfare ‘out there’ and domestic violence ‘in here’ as some putatively private issue. Rachel Pain memorably called this ‘intimate war’ (Pain, 2015) and together with work on intimacy-geopolitics (Pain and Staeheli, 2014; Pratt and Rosner, 2012), war was ‘brought home’ in a way that, crucially, troubled the comfortable distance from which so-called ‘remote’ war was being both waged and studied. More recently, Michelle Daigle has made a similar argument with regard to work on colonialism, questioning geographers’ ‘willingness to examine, discuss and contend with the impacts of colonialism in the places that are removed from one’s day-to-day life’. Daigle further points out an uncomfortable irony: that geography has extensively theorised responsibility across multiple scales, but ordinarily this amounts to an accountability to ‘spatially distant neighbors’ and ‘spatially proximate strangers along the lines of class’ – and seldom an examination of the ‘reality of settler colonialism, and what responsibility means in such contexts when one is occupying stolen Indigenous lands’ (Daigle in Naylor et al., 2018: 201). The critique is salient for the decolonisation of war agenda and forces a rethink of the where of war as well as global-intimate hierarchies of violence, while also raising unsettling questions about who gets to do research, from where, on where, and why? And what can be done to disrupt the privilege that comes with studying war and colonialism from a distance, out of harm’s way?

War-space is elastic space (Bhungalia, 2023) and at the very same time as the US military was claiming that there was – is – no outside to the ‘global war on terror’, political geography was reaching a similar conclusion but via a radically different epistemology. Where evermore mobile regimes of war were predicated in-part on the irrelevance of geography – a capacity for and right to lethal strike anywhere (Jones, 2020) – Derek Gregory sought to critique the logic of the ‘everywhere war’ by insisting that geography was (is) not only relevant but the key medium through which the expansion of war was made possible (Gregory, 2011). This phrase is not meant to suggest that war as a military activity is literally everywhere, but rather that via means at once technological and cultural, the capacities of war machines (militaries and societies) in the 21^st century have been extended such that there is a potential for violence in an expanding war-space (Jones et al., 2024). Jennifer Fluri adds an important qualification, reminding us that the everywhere war is often an elsewhere war. By this she draws attention to the ways in which US imaginings of terror as potentially everywhere in-turn enable a form of warfare fought ‘over there’ (e.g. in Afghanistan) so that US citizens can feel safe ‘over here’ (Fluri, 2014). Feminist approaches to war-space underscore the ‘importance of grasping the specificity of war’s locatedness and materializations’ (Jacobsen, 2022: 2; Kinsella, 2020). Violence is not flat, not everywhere one and the same. Clearly, there exist relative degrees of exposure, danger, protection, and safety – and these tend to be structured in (neo)colonial, gendered, and spatial ways. Some places, homes, neigbourhoods, cities, nations, regions, and states are more or less peaceful than others. Gaza and Beirut are not Tel Aviv and Washington, the Donbas is not Moscow, and North Kivu is not Goma. (If you had to look that last one up, as I did, doesn’t that say something about how provincial our geographies of war remain?)

One of the most transformative insights of feminist scholarship has been the recognition of the home and domestic space as a site and space of war, a space where war is experienced and felt in everyday and intimate ways (Owens, 2015; Swaine, 2024). These perspectives overturned public/private and domestic/international binaries and should now be revisited with great urgency in light of the new prominence of decolonial theory in geography, IR, and beyond. As Jennifer Hyndman has argued, ‘[a]ny public/private divide to map the proper place of war misses the point: the battlefield is everywhere, and gendered civilian bodies are the sites of violence’ (Hyndman, 2019: 8). War is therefore not only out or over ‘there’ but ‘here’ in homes and domestic spaces, (Brickell, 2020; Griffiths and Repo, 2020; Harker, 2009; Jackman and Brickell, 2022), urban and rural places (Little, 2020; Mustafa et al., 2019; Truelove and Ruszczyk, 2022), and very much part of the everyday rather than the exceptional (Ehrkamp et al., 2022: 20; Fluri, 2021; Smith, 2020) – or at least this is the case for certain gendered, racialised and classed bodies.

One of the hallmarks of feminist work most relevant to a decolonising agenda has been a focus on the body or, more specifically, on the body as a site and scale of differentiated capacities and vulnerabilities. The body in feminist work is not one thing, but simultaneously an ‘analytical tool, scale, site, space of representation, commodity, and physical organism with its own dimensions and that is subjected to other processes’ (Mountz, 2018: 761). Centring the body and embodiment in accounts of war (Hyndman, 2007; Sylvester, 2013; Wilcox, 2015) is crucial for several (related) reasons. First, bodies move beyond many of the binaries that structure war, enabling us to understand and challenge the situated making and unmaking of public/private, civilian/combatant, secure/insecure, and so on (Faria et al., 2020; Fluri, 2011; Kinsella, 2011; Sweet, 2016). Second, attending to bodies is a reminder that geopolitics is felt, visceral, and material and not only discursive (Mountz, 2018: 762; Sharp, 2021). Third, a focus on bodies acutely reveals the variegated and differential capacities of particular individuals, groups, or populations to both harm and be harmed, which in turn is central to figuring out where and how the ‘nebulous battle space’ (Fluri, 2014: 810) is written onto and into actual lives and grounded geographies. Fourth, by examining the violence done to (and by) bodies, we are able to think about ‘different kinds of violence as a whole system of oppression’ (Fluri and Piedalue, 2017: 536) which in turn informs the possibilities for action. As Sweet articulates, ‘we are able to take action that is more holistic because the formation of the problem is not sidelined by invalid distinctions of public and private places that uphold patriarchal and capitalist constructions of gender, race, class, and sexuality, and so on in spatial formations’ (Sweet, 2016: 204, cited in Fluri and Piedalue, 2017: 536).

This final point is an important one given feminist commitments to social justice, but a note of caution is also necessary. Jo Sharp has warned that there remains a tendency in this work to focus on ‘examples where (powerful) geopolitics is imposed upon (weak) bodies, rather than on (powerful) bodies actively making geopolitics’ (Sharp, 2021: 992; see also Sharp, 2020). The critique is about both agency and representation and responding to it is essential to ‘suspend damage’ (Tuck, 2009) to communities and places experiencing violence. Fortunately, here too, geography has a rich body of scholarship to draw from and in particular anti-racist work and black geographies has for a long time emphasised the need to move beyond representational regimes of suffering toward more active apprehensions of what Katherine McKittrick has called ‘geographies of survival, resistance, and the struggle against death’ (McKittrick, 2013: 14 emphasis in original). One of the primary ways in which concepts of war and our epistemological frames remain colonial is precisely through this re-inscription of violence and victimhood, thus any agenda to decolonise war must challenge representational regimes as well as the ethics of the research encounter. To these challenges we now turn.

IV Decolonial geographies of war

The ‘decolonial turn’ in geography has renewed interest in questions of race, empire, and the ongoing lived social and economic realities of slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism. With some notable exceptions (Attewell, 2024; Jacobsen, 2022), work in Black and Indigenous geographies has remained unconnected to political geographies of war, violence, and non-violence. The aim of this penultimate section is to connect these literatures and to do so I highlight three spaces of potential conceptual overlap: agency and a civilian sense of place, knowing war, and race and empire. Another goal here is a further broadening and reimagining of ‘the political’ in political geography (Amoore, 2020). As Wesley Attewell recently and succinctly put it in the pages of this journal, geographers must reckon ‘with a different tradition of radical thought than the one that has dominated the discipline for the last 50 years’ and central to this, he argues, is the ‘rediscovery of black and indigenous geographies’ as ‘essential planks of our field’ (Attewell, 2024: 13; see also: Nayak, 2024).

4.1 Agency and a civilian sense of place

Black Geographies is a field with a rich and long-established intellectual heritage in Black feminist thought, abolitionism, and Black Marxism (Davis et al., 2022). While Black Geographies emerged specifically in the US and was concerned initially with African-American Geographies (Noxolo, 2022), and while the field appears ‘new’ to some, Black theory has for a long time sought to understand race and racism as ‘the engine that drives the ship of state’s national and imperial projects’ and as therefore also central to the logic of capitalism (Pulido, 2017; Robinson, 2020; Sharpe, 2016: 3). Black Geographies is a field that ‘critiques the erasure of Blackness within the whiteness and coloniality of geographical thought’, but as Pat Noxolo points out, it is also crucially about the centring of ‘Black spatial thought and agency’ (Noxolo, 2022: 1232). Black Geographies pays specific attention to the spatial forms and expressions of slavery: the plantation, the big house, the auction, the ship, and the prison among other spatialities of domination (Gilmore, 2007; McKittrick, 2011, 2013; Sharpe, 2016). These spaces of slavery and the racial forms of domination that underpin them are understood to structure but not wholly define the present and as Christina Sharpe puts it, this work seeks to investigate ‘the ongoing problem of Black exclusion from social, political, and cultural belonging; our objection from the realm of the human’ (Sharpe, 2016: 14). Yet, at the same time McKittrick has cautioned that ‘analyses of racial violence are stalled by a paradoxical preoccupation with the suffering/violated black body and the stubborn denial of a black sense of place’ (McKittrick, 2011: 948 emphasis in original). This is at once a critique of modes of conceptual representation that render Black and oppressed life agentless, and a foreclosing of potential spatio-temporal futures. Political geographers might well recognise these conceits because in the last couple of decades something similar happened with renditions of Agamben’s bare life, Foucault’s biopolitics and Mbembe’s necropolitics. Alexander Weheliye made exactly this point of such canonical political geography concepts, arguing that they ‘neglect and/or actively dispute the existence of alternative modes of life alongside the violence, subjection, exploitation, and rationalisation that defined the modern human’ (Weheliye, 2014: 1–2).

With these critiques in mind, Black Geographies ‘promises an ethical analytics of race based not on suffering, but on human life’ (McKittrick, 2011: 948; Nash, 2022). In one way or another this work emphasises Black agency and consciousness, be that Saidiya Hartman’s ‘beautiful experiments’, or the many meanings of living life ‘in the wake’ with ‘wake work’ helping to ‘imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery’ (Hartman, 2019; Sharpe, 2016: 18). Noxolo usefully thinks about these moves as an ‘im/possibility’ of realising Black Geographies, understanding that racialised ontologies of the inhuman and their associated subjectivities cannot simply be wished away, but also that agency is recuperable even under conditions of ongoing (settler)colonialism and racial oppression (Noxolo, 2022: 1233–1235). Tariq Jazeel makes a parallel point about decolonial work not being subtractive because the point isn’t to return to some ‘pre-colonial purity’ but rather ‘to work out how to go on […] in the worlds that colonialism built, and how to build more just worlds going forward’ (Jazeel in Naylor and Jazeel, forthcoming: np).

Mainstream political geography can learn a lot from Black Geographies and while the differences as well as the similarities between slavery, war, and (settler)colonialism require a much more careful working through than I can offer here, there is some important conceptual overlap, some of which is finally being realised. In their important paper on decolonial geography in Gaza, Agha and colleagues highlight a body of work in Palestine devoted to thinking through agency under conditions of war and colonialism, holding up the ‘decolonial praxis [that] is readily evident in the decoloniality of living that takes shape in the quotidian, often mundane Palestinian spaces and forms of life that persist in and beyond colonised space’ (Agha et al., 2024: 6). In an attempt to weave Black Geographies with feminist geopolitics, Vasudevan and Smith offer a fresh new take on what they call ‘domestic geopolitics’, which they define as ‘a reconceived feminist geopolitics integrating an analysis of Black geographies as a domestic form of colonialism, with an expanded understanding of domesticity as political work’ (Vasudevan and Smith, 2020: 1160). Their analysis highlights forms of racialised capitalism that create conditions of toxicity in Badin, North Carolina and Flint, Michigan (see also: Pulido, 2016), but rather than overidentifying blackness with toxicity, they theorise the everyday work done by racialised communities to make life, home, and community which together they argue constitutes an important yet underappreciated mode of geopolitical praxis – precisely the kind of everyday shaping of geopolitics that Jo Sharp (2021) encouraged us to think about (see section II).

Some of the racialised and gendered logics identified by Black Geographies and feminist geopolitics underpin the making and unmaking of the figure of the civilian in war. There is some work in Geography on the civilian in war (Fluri, 2011; Gregory, 2006; Jones, 2012), but there could be more engagement with the lively debates taking place in feminist and critical IR and legal studies (e.g. Gordon and Perugini, 2020; Gregory, 2019, 2025; Shah, 2019). Helen Kinsella, for example, has showed that the distinction between civilians and combatants in war is highly contingent on discourses of innocence, civilisation, and gender, such that the protections that should be afforded to civilians are often turned into a rationalisation for killing (Kinsella, 2011; see also: Eastwood, 2017; Khalili, 2012; Zehfuss, 2018). Deeply colonial histories run through practices of warfare in which ‘their’ civilians are cast out of legal and normative protections that simultaneously evict certain racialised populations from the definition of humanity (Jones and Shah, 2022; Moyn, 2021). In turn, so-called humane forms of warfare, which geographers and others have critiqued, produce western forms of warfare as ethical and legitimate and which require the elimination of what Lisa Parks (2016) calls the ‘targeted class’ for the protection of humanity. While vital, such framings risk the denial of what we might call a civilian sense of place, a place in which civilians live beyond death and survival in the creation of new lives under conditions of war, siege, and displacement. Fortunately, there is a large and growing body of literature on the question of civilian agency (Baines and Paddon, 2012; Jose and Medie, 2015; Kaplan, 2017; Krause, 2018; Krause et al., 2023). Engaging this literature and connecting it with insights from Black Geographies will help better connect the dots between the making and unmaking of bodies and poplulations living and dying with and through violence. Paraphrasing Vasudevan and Smith (2020) and the Black Geographies literature more broadly, maintaining life under such conditions – which are so often explicitly toxic – requires a lot of everyday work as a form of geopolitical praxis. With some notable exceptions, geographers have neither celebrated nor worked to co-produce this everyday praxis with civilians living through war. Medical anthropology, public health, and the health sciences emerge in this space as sources of inspiration because they have been some of the strongest advocates for initiatives that centre indigenous and civilian-led health and vitality, whether these are the mobility strategies employed to access healthcare cross borders (Dewachi et al., 2018), local first-aid provision (Ismail et al., 2019), exposing the settler-colonial determinants of health (Hammoudeh et al., 2020; Wispelwey et al., 2023), or trauma coping mechanisms (Afana et al., 2020; Veronese et al., 2018). Whatever the source, there remains much work to be done in pushing back against the overidentification of civilians with deathworlds and to rethink civilian agency in terms of world-making capacities albeit under ongoing punishing conditions.

4.2 Knowing and feeling war

As noted in the previous section, feminist political geography centres the experiential in a bid to re-narrate war from a more everyday perspective. In this section I suggest that this literature can benefit from a more explicit and sustained engagement with decolonial theory and practice and settler-colonial studies. I take my cue here from Malena Jacobsen’s theorisation of wars in refuge, which to my knowledge is the only work in geography that has explicitly engaged with the decolonising war literature. Jacobsen is interested in the experience of Syrian refugees in exile in Denmark, but rather than theorising the space of war and the space of refuge as distinct or distant, she insists that war works through refuge. Central to her argument is that Syrians experience Denmark as a space of war and she is able to build such a compelling case because she takes Syrian refugees’ intimate knowledges of war as the starting point for her analysis. Jacobsen argues that this move necessitates the rethinking of a broader set of questions about war, including ‘where war is, what counts as war, and who decides’ (Jacobsen, 2022: 1). Such questions are essential if we are to elucidate the kinds of civilian senses of place we just touched upon, and can and should be expanded to think about the agency of different war subjectivities, not least the refugee (Espiritu, 2014; Hyndman and Giles, 2016) – for as Jennifer Hyndman reminds us, ‘resettlement is a strategy, not an end point of displacement’ (Hyndman, 2019: 7). But I also think we can expand Jacobsen’s questions about war, and especially the question of who decides what counts as war to think more broadly and inclusively about epistemologies of war and violence while simultaneously taking seriously work that approaches war and violence from embodied decolonial positionalities.

One of the ways in which colonialism pervades the contemporary study of war is through institutional structures of academia and attendant logics of foreign geopolitical and strategic ‘experts’ who study war from a safe distance. In an explicit attempt to bring the decolonial to political geography Naylor et al. (2018: 201) point out the troubling fact that writing on war ‘continues to be shaped by a large number of academics from the “north” who examine colonialism in the “south”’. Decolonisation demands less extractive, less one-way, and more equitable modes of knowledge production. Naylor and colleagues further argue that “[t]he decolonial requires rethinking/retheorizing from alterity and multiplicity in knowledge production. Put simply, we need more and different perspectives and to more deeply consider privilege over knowledge and where it ‘sits’”. (Naylor et al., 2018: 200). In a similar vein and in the context of settler-colonial British Columbia, Daigle draws attention to the ‘decolonial relations of accountability [that] are embodied by Indigenous peoples every day’ (Daigle in Naylor et al., 2018: 202). In the same set of interventions, Sofia Zaragocin calls for a decolonial feminist geopolitics that pays attention to the already ‘existing traditions that invoke decolonised feminist notions of place and embodied epistemologies’ (Zaragocin in Naylor et al., 2018: 204). As an example, she highlights ‘Cuerpo-Territorio’ (Body-Territory), ‘a concept that places the community and territory as a single subject of political agency that resists and identifies violations against women’s bodies and territories as part of the same process’.

There are unexplored parallels here with two cognate concepts that more explicitly bring the body into contact with war. The first is the concept of corpography, which Gregory defines as ‘a way of apprehending the battle space through the body as an acutely physical field in which the senses of sound, smell and touch were increasingly privileged in the construction of a profoundly haptic or somatic geography’ (Gregory, 2015: 91).⁶ Corpography must be about both soldiers and civilians and indeed there are opportunities to expand current intellectual and political horizons by thinking about the connections between those who wield force and violence and those who are subject to them. Helen Kinsella does exactly this in her exigis of the role of sleep in war, reflecting on how the idea of a ‘sensate democracy’ might afford ‘the possibility for a biopolitical solidarity […] among those deemed friends and enemies’ (Kinsella, 2020: 121). The other concept which appears to complement corpography in potentially productive ways is the concept of harb nafsia – an Arabic phrase with an imperfect translation denoting something like an ‘internal war’ or ‘internalised war’. Jacobsen borrows the term from Syrian refugees who use it to express a sort of war on the soul that is carried in space and time from the physical battlefield. Together these concepts push contemporary theorisations of the body, and the body as a medium for better knowing war. Connecting ideas around a civilian sense of place and the sensorial possibilities of knowing and feeling war, we might ask: how are decolonial futures and civilian senses of place being built by those who know war most intimately, and what might they reveal of the ontological time-spaces of later modern war and colonialism as ongoing violent but not determinative projects?

4.3 Race and empire

In an incisive recent paper, Wesley Attewell has made a compelling case for what he calls a new political geography of race war (Attewell, 2024), suggesting that political geography has been blinkered by ‘conceptual lodestars’ – geopolitics and geoeconomics – and has thus failed to ‘build a geographical theory of empire capable of reckoning with its everyday workings and contradictions, across spaces and scales, and at home and abroad’ (Attewell, 2024: 2). The problem is not a neglect of empire per se but rather the neglect of empire as a question of race. To address this, Attewel underscores feminist political geography’s troubling of the domestic/international binary before then connecting this to questions of race and racial capitalism, centring the connections between the policing of race domestically with the racialised designs of empire abroad. Attewell concedes that the literature remains US-centric, but there is an unexplored opportunity here to connect his call to focus on race and empire with Barkawi’s agenda to decolonise war from locations beyond the West. Machold’s (2024) new account of the entaglement of policing and security across India and Palestine/Israel does exactly this, providing a critique of the political techonologies that make ‘global’ racial governance possible (see also Machold, 2018). This is not to say we should forget US empire, but there are other formations of empire and imperialism, both historic and contemporary, and aside from the settler-colonial contexts of Canada and Australia, there is a dearth of work in Geography on, for example, Russian and Chinese imperialism or understanding the war in Ukraine as a de/colonial war (Barkawi, 2022).

The choice to ‘study’ or not study a place is often determined by always colonially inflected geographical imaginations. When it comes to researching war there remains something colonially convenient and even voyeuristic; questions of ‘feasibility’, ‘risk’, and ‘access’ so often leave the global (and local) cartographies of violence unchallenged (Parkinson, 2019). Perhaps most problematically, our willingness to identify some places and people with violence reproduces violence in those places but it also marks an unwillingness to locate violence closer to home. This is partly about our colonial conceptions of violence – a willingness to identify violence when it comes to body counts and rubble ‘over there’ but a reluctance to trace its origins and/or logics ‘here’. There is also the question of which wars garner disciplinary attention; the attention on some wars (‘the war on terror’) and not others reinforces certain colonial hierarchies. Why, for example, have geographers had so little to say about wars in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar, or the DRC? There are many reasons, but one possible answer is that these are seen as civil or domestic wars and that the putative absence of the US or a major European military power makes these and other wars somehow less worthy of critical scrutiny – and yet wars in each of these places are intimately connected to their still-unfolding (post)colonial histories. On a related note, for all the interest in the decolonial within geography, our discipline has had very little to say about decolonial wars (c.f. Clayton and Kumar, 2019; Craggs and Neate, 2023; Davies, 2019; Legg, 2005, 2008) – with the exception of Palestine. History is an obvious source of inspiration, but there is incredibly exciting work we should be engaging with more in critical legal studies, international law, and critical IR (Barkawi, 2016; Cuddy and Kattan, 2023; Dijk, 2022; Kinsella, 2023; Perugini, 2024; Van Dijk, 2021).

V Exclusion or progress? Plurality and solidarity in decolonial times

‘Progress’ in a field can mean many things, but progress for some is not progress for all. Feminist political geography has done much of the critical work to rethink the conceptual categories of war (and peace) and yet these transformative contributions remain largely unacknowledged. Louise Amoore characterises such erasure as a form of annexing of feminist political geography, a relegation of lucid and conceptually vital thought to the category of the ‘merely feminist’ (Amoore, 2020).⁷ Too often political geography has ‘advanced’ not in spite of the forgetting or subordination of pluralist perspectives but because these exclusions reproduce the field in a particular (white, masculinist, and ableist) way that benefits certain ways of doing geographical work. The same applies equally to IR. Patricia Owens Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men, for example, provides a vital critique of the ways in which the field was built on the (erased) intellectual labour and expertise of women. This report has suggested that conceptual, empirical, and political progress on the geographies of war and violence is dependent on the centring of hitherto peripheral perspectives in feminist, Black, and Indigenous geographies. This is not just about broadening the community of political geography (how utterly awful that such significant parts of our field should be so easily and repeatedly dismissed); it is also about the very ontology of political geographical concepts, not only whose voices count but what counts as valid and discipline-defining work in our field.

In what could prove a foreshadowing analysis, some scholars have suggested that geography is not yet ready to include Black Geographies (Noxolo, 2022: 1234), that the whiteness of our discipline and of Higher Education ‘stymies decolonial agendas’ (Nayak, 2024: 1), and that attempts to decolonise geography may therefore be premature (De Leeuw and Hunt, 2018; Esson et al., 2017). There are a host of ongoing colonial power relations that make these concerns very real even during a putative ‘decolonial turn’ in geography (see Naylor, 2024; Naylor and Thayer, 2022; Radcliffe, 2022). One of the most salient among these is that privilege within our (sub)discipline is tied to coloniality through the jobs we occupy, the fieldtrips we lead, our lack of diversity, the wars we study and those many people and issues we neglect, and so much more. For decolonial thinkers, colonialism structures the present in ways that privilege the West and Western ways of knowing. This means that what Naylor calls capital ‘D’ Decolonising and small ‘d’ decolonising mean different though complementary things: the former involves a fundamental reallocation of resources and land, ‘the repatriation of Indigenous land and life’ (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 21), whereas the latter is about rethinking the production of knowledge (Naylor, 2024: 74–75). None of this is easy, but it should not paralyse us. In geography our task is made easier by the decolonial and feminist thinkers that have come before us and who have already outlined alternative ways of knowing (Koopman, 2011a; Sharp, 2011), highlighted indigenous sovereignties (De Leeuw, 2016; Macaspac, 2019), and made suggestions for what meaningful solidarity work might look like (Agha et al., 2024; Bauder, 2020; Borowiak et al., 2018; Kelliher, 2018). What remains is for this work to be fully brought to bear on questions of war and violence and for this ‘merely’ feminist and Black work to figure more prominently in (political) geography because of the transformations it has already brought and will continue to bring to questions on the what, where, when, and who of war.

If coloniality means the “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, 243, in Esson et al., 2017: 384–385), then as Margaret Marietta Ramírez has suggested, the decolonial is ‘a process, a state of becoming’ (Ramirez in Naylor et al., 2018: 205). In closing I want to suggest that political geography is currently caught between the colonial and decolonial and in this report I have tried to show that feminist, Black, and Indigenous geographies provide both the conceptual tools and justice-based politics to tilt us in favour of decolonial war futures. Attending more closely to what I have called (i) agency and a civilian sense of place; (ii) knowing and feeling war; and (iii) race and empire could help further in realising such futures but there are many other possible routes and horizons, especially if we pause the search for universals in favour of what Naylor has called ‘the pluriverse in practice’ – that is ‘a movement away from Western- and Eurocentric understandings, explanations, and fixes (universals) and towards writing the earth in its multiplicity’ (Naylor, 2024: 75, see also: Kaul et al., 2022).

At and across institutional scales, government and non-government funding structures in the Global North continue to distribute funding for research on (rather than with) folks from the Global South, sometimes in explicitly colonial ways. These funding mechanisms and the broader political economy of scholarship (at least in the UK) privilege certain forms of ‘impact’ and ‘engagement’ that seek policy tweaks and interventions on the lives and livelihoods of others. The colonial overtones, let alone the normative dimensions of such scholarly interventions are seldom questioned as academics are driven to deliver ‘relevant’ research and a return on investment. For geography especially but not uniquely there is also the question of ‘fieldwork’ and the extent to which different methodologies mirror various parts of the colonial encounter, including most glaringly its exploitation (of labour, time, resources, etc.) and extractivism (the raw materials for a successful research career) (see Griffiths, 2017; Robinson, 1994). The colonialism of our epistemological frameworks are also not easy to shift. Research can and should fill the truth and information void that so often accompanies war and military violence (Agha et al., 2024), but this leaves unquestioned the forms of ‘evidence’ that come to matter and to whom. So often even critical and solidarity-based work invites affected communities to ‘show’ their wounds or to document or otherwise narrate their devastation as if there were some justice-based judicial or ethical forum capable of listening, let alone intervening in ongoing patterns of violence (Dewachi, 2015; Erakat, 2019; Simpson, 2014). Many of those forums, from the International Criminal Court to the various arms of the United Nations remain problematically influenced by global power politics; liberalism’s last utopia is in no small part a neo-colonial instrument (Abdullahi, 2024). This may seem overdetermined but until the feminist decolonial imperative as theory and praxis is mainstream and unblunted (see Scott and Olivius, 2023) the (potential) coloniality of geographical conceptions of war remains an ever-present threat to (imagining) pluriverse decolonial futures – and perhaps even one day a world without war.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Mark Griffiths, Helen Kinsella, and Katharyne Mitchell for their incisive comments and feedback on the manuscript. And to Caitrin and Hugh for liberation and clarity. Any and all mistakes are my own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper is based on research conducted as part of the project: ‘The afterlives of war-related injury: Mapping civilian trauma pathways in conflict settings’ (UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, grant number MR/X035794/1).

ORCID iD

Craig Jones

Notes

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Geographies of war and violence I: Decolonising war

Abstract

Keywords

I Introduction

II Decolonising the concept of war

III War beyond binaries: Feminist transformations of war

3.1 War-time

3.2 War-space

IV Decolonial geographies of war

4.1 Agency and a civilian sense of place

4.2 Knowing and feeling war

4.3 Race and empire

V Exclusion or progress? Plurality and solidarity in decolonial times

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References