2nd and Final Call for Papers – AAG Annual Conference, New York, February 24-28, 2012
Critical Geographies of Counter-Insurgency
Prolonged counter-insurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other
locations, have led the US military to re-discover the importance of the
social sciences in war efforts. Geographers in particular have been
called upon to help map the “human terrain”, either in direct or
indirect support of the execution of counter-insurgency campaigns. It
is, however, also possible for geographers to engage in
counter-insurgency research in ways that do not support such
counter-insurgencies, but instead seek to reveal the injustices
associated with them, as well as demonstrate the long-term yet
frequently uneven and underreported impacts of counter-insurgency
interventions. In this panel, we postulate that both the immediate and
lasting effects of counter-insurgencies raise complex questions about
the ethics and politics of counter-insurgency research. This paper
session considers the geographies of counter-insurgency from various
perspectives, with the ultimate aim of working towards developing
critical geographies of counter-insurgency campaigns, drawing on
experiences from places as diverse as mainland Southeast Asia, Central
America and Africa. We strive to better understand how the development
of critical counter-insurgency geographies can help reveal the
injustices that frequently result from counter-insurgencies. We also
wish to consider how the varying experiences of geographers with regard
to counter-insurgencies have shaped geography as a discipline, so as to
inform debates about social scientists' participation in military
operations, as well as to contribute to increasing the sophistication of
the ways geographers variously report on and critique
counter-insurgencies.
Organizers:
Joe Bryan
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography
University of Colorado-Boulder
[log in to unmask]
and
Ian G. Baird
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography
University of Wisconsin-Madison
[log in to unmask]
|