POSTED ON BEHALF OF JAMES SIDAWAY.

Amongst the usual flows of emails in my inbox was recently an invitation to participate in International Geographical Union's (IGU) Regional Conference to be held in Santiago, Chile in November 2011.

The details are here: http://www.ugi2011.cl/

As I followed the links it became evident that the conference will be held inside the Military Geographical Institute and is being chaired by a serving senior military officer.

I would be interested knowing a little more about this.

Links between the military and geography are not news.  

Moreover the role of the armed forces in a democratic Chile is evidently vastly different to that during years of Pinochet.

And I fully expect that any IGU conference will be open to all strands of critical debate.

However I am interested in knowing more about relationship of the Military Geographical Institute to the sites from where Augusto Pinochet took geopolitics into the streets and presidential palace of Chile on and after the coup of September 11, 1973? I note from the Spanish pages of Wikipedia, that Pinochet finished his education at the same Institute: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet

Geographical conferences held at other sites of past imperial and military influence (such as the Royal Geographical Society in London to name one venue with which I am quite familiar) have found it necessary to address such legacies as well as ongoing relationships with corporate and state power. Geography is inevitably tangled up with these.

Indeed a recent exchange in the journal Political Geography points to some ongoing debates related to a US-based geographical society and US military connections of recent fieldwork/expeditions. See: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09626298

 
I could find no reference on the call for papers of the Santiago conference to similar issues, beyond a reference to the conference site offering "safe, secure conditions for attendees''.
 

Yet they do strike me as important questions to be asked of the context/site in the conference is to be held. Therefore it would be interesting if others with more insight on this issue might post here.

James D Sidaway
Professor of Political and Cultural Geography

Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies,

University of Amsterdam,
Nieuwe Prinsengracht 130,
1018 VZ Amsterdam,
The Netherlands

 
 
Geographies of Globalizations Research Programme:
http://www.aissr.uva.nl/gog/research.cfm