Isla Forsyth

This paper argues that historical geography is particularly well positioned to make insightful contributions to military geographies and critical military studies more broadly because of its commitment to critically exploring the genealogies and consequences of military violence, which are too often seen as a given or historically non‐contingent. This is demonstrated by a review of existing literature which variously acknowledges the emergence of disciplinary geography in concert with the modern military, traces the contributions of geographers to and their entanglements with the military, and accounts for the complicities, consequences, and legacies of military activities and violence through a historical lens. The paper reveals how historical geography exposes the knowledges, technologies, and lives that produce and are shaped by military activities as being spatially and temporally specific. Further, it suggests future directions for historical geography that would extend and expand the discipline's attempts to more fully acknowledge the place of military geographies in our histories, politics, spatialities, cultures, and everyday lives.

The drone has become emblematic of late modern warfare promising the full spectrum of surveillance and surgical precision in targeting. As a technology, it has captured the popular imagination and ...

This paper makes an intervention highlighting the animal dimension of military geographies as an overlooked yet illuminating aspect of the hybrid nature of warfare. By bringing animal geographies into dialogue with critical military geographies and with a focus on relational ethics, the processes, performance and consequences of the more-than-human nature of the battlespace are examined through a vignette of Wojtek the bear. Wojtek was a mascot, pet and officially enlisted soldier of the Polish Army in the Second World War who travelled the desert plains, helped to fight at the Battle of Monte Cassino, before being demobbed with his fellow Polish comrades in the UK, eventually ending his civilian days in Edinburgh Zoo. Although a well-known figure Wojtek and his biography have predominately been used as a means to explore the Polish soldiers’ experience of the Second World War with the result that the bear as an animal is absent. This paper, therefore, puts the bear back into his biography in order to acknowledge the role and lived experience of animals in the military. Further, it suggests that exploring the place of animals in the military requires geographers to articulate the hybrid nature of warfare and also to explore the ethico-political relations this produces.

This paper explores the entangled relationship between geographical knowledge and covert warfare through a study of soldier and desert explorer Ralph Bagnold. On Italy's declaration of war in 1940 the British military became engaged in a process of transforming the desert plains of the Middle East into an unnerving, obscure battlefield. General Wavell, Commander in Chief, ensured he drew upon those with a grounded understanding of this shifting terrain. Bagnold drew Wavell's attention because he had previously conducted pioneering aeolian research (later published as the seminal The physics of blown sand and desert dunes 1941, Methuen), as well as having developed desert‐based technologies for exploration. Due to Bagnold's intimate knowledge of the desert he was perfectly positioned to be charged with a small, specially equipped force that could wreak havoc behind enemy lines; a covert unit known as the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG). This study of Bagnold's desert exploration and the emergence of the LRDG in WWII will uncover how geographical knowledge became engrained within the prosecution of desert warfare. The paper explores the ways in which the particularities of the desert shaped technologies of mobilities and covert methods of conflict and how the geographies of the desert have been informed through military‐inflected exploration combined with technological innovation.

Geographers have increasingly begun to attend to the local environments of science, considering how these spaces shape and influence knowledge production. This paper will explore the insights a spatial analytic can contribute to the history of science by exploring one scientific performance space; the field site. Already, rich and insightful studies into the geographies of field science have figured these sites as complex, subjective and lively places. However, so far, there appears to have only been peripheral attention paid to the multiple and myriad nonhuman animals that are present in the field. The field is a site where animals have been the object of study, provided transport, companionship, sport and food, but their presence within the history of field science is conspicuously absent. This paper asks how to study the spatialities of animal lives enrolled in the diverse technologies and knowledge that encompass scientific practice, and considers what such an engagement could offer to contemporary scientific study. Therefore, this paper will review animal and hybrid geographies, and methodological tools that attend to the performativity of science, such as the actor–network theory and Pickering's ‘the mangle’. It will consider what these literatures and conceptual frameworks can add to understandings of the historical, social, cultural and political nature of more‐than‐human knowledge through a consideration of field science.

Throughout the Second World War camouflage was employed to conceal and counterfeit the military’s presence in diverse landscape habitats; a technology designed to wipe out revealing patterns and inscribe false forms, all in order to make of enemy reconnaissance a glass eye. It was on the plains of the North African desert that the technology proved its effectiveness for military strategy. The desert was an expansive, shifting environment, demanding a new relationship between modern militarism and knowledge of the earth’s surface. Where aerial reconnaissance could threaten to expose military desert designs, other forms of visual literacy were developed to engage with the vertical, as well as the horizontal, plane, all in order to camouflage military movements. This paper critically considers the triangulation of the technology of the aeroplane, and the camera, alongside the granular surface of sand. It explores the working practices of British desert camoufleurs, a diverse group of practitioners, including artists, scientists, filmmakers and, less expectedly, a magician, who were handpicked by the military due to their skills in visual literacy. Their innovations in camouflage form a narrative focusing on the development of desert-based design practices that subsequently arose from military engagements with this environment. The paper seeks to show both the aesthetic and the political implications of these military incursions into the desert, telling how the militarization of the desert exploited a land of mirages to deadly effect.