Geopolitical imagination stabilizes the world for the imposition of an institutionalized slow violence that squashes any resistance.

Contemporary social theory might point to Michel Foucault, and the argument drawn from his writings that politics is the extension of war rather than the other way round. Given the interest in biopolitics and geogovernance within the discipline these matters are obviously relevant but the connection to peace needs to be thought carefully beyond formulations that simply assume it as the opposite of wars (Morrissey 2011). This is especially the case given the changing modes of contemporary warfare and the advocacy of violence as an appropriate policy in present circumstances. The modes of warfare at the heart of liberalism suggest that the security of what Reid and Dillon (2009) call the biohuman, the liberal consuming subject, involves a violent series of practices designed to pacify the world by the elimination of political alternatives. The tension here suggests an imperial peace, a forceful imposition of a state of non-war. In George W. Bush’s terms justifying the war on terror, a long struggle to eliminate tyranny (Dalby 2009a). Peace is, in this geopolitical understanding, what comes after the elimination of opposition. In late 2011 such formulations dominated discussions of the death of Colonel Gadaffi in Libya.¶ The dramatic transformation of human affairs in the last couple of generations do require that would-be peaceful geographers look both to the importance of non-violence and simultaneously to how global transformations are changing the landscape of violence and social change, all of it still under the threat of nuclear devastation should major inter-state war occur once again. The re-emergence of non-violence as an explicit political strategy, and in particular the use of Gene Sharp’s (1973) ideas of non-violent direct action in recent events pose these questions very pointedly. Geographers have much to offer in such re-thinking that may yet play their part in a more global understanding of how interconnected our fates are becoming and how inappropriate national state boundaries are as the premise for political action in a rapidly changing biosphere.¶ But to do so some hard thinking is needed on geopolitics, and on how it works as well as how peace-full scholarship might foster that which it desires. Linking the practical actions of non-violence from Tahrir Square to those of the Occupy Wall Street actions, underway as the first draft of this paper was keyboarded, requires that we think very carefully about the practices that now are designated in terms of globalization. Not all this is novel, but the geopolitical scene is shifting in ways that need to be incorporated into the new thinking within geography about war, peace, violence and what the discipline might have to say about, and contribute to, non-violence as well as to contestations of contemporary lawfare (Gregory 2006).¶ Whether the delegitimization of violence as a mode of rule will be extended further in coming decades is one of the big questions facing peace researchers. The American reaction to 9/11 set things back dramatically, an opportunity to respond in terms of response to a crime and diplomacy was squandered, but the wider social refusal to accept repression and violence as appropriate modes of rule has interesting potential to constrain the use of military force. The professionalization of many high technology militaries also reduces their inclination to involve themselves in repressing social movements, although here Mikhail Gorbachev’s refusal to use the Red Army against dissidents in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s remains emblematic of the changes norms of acceptable rule that have been extended in the last few generations.¶ A geography discipline seriously interested in peace needs to link the social processes on the relatively small scale such as the non-violent protests Megoran (2011) highlights, and the peaceful accompaniment actions that Koopman (2011) documents, to the larger geopolitical transformations of our times, to make the eminently geographical point that peace activities vary widely from place to place, but now are an important part of larger contemporary geopolitical transformations. ¶ Geopolitics has mostly been about rivalries between great powers and their contestations of power on the large scale. These specifications of the political world focus on states and the perpetuation of threats mapped as external dangers to supposedly pacific polities. Much geopolitical discourse specifies the world as a dangerous place, hence precisely because of these mappings, one supposedly necessitating violence in what passes for a realist interpretation of great powers as the prime movers of history (Mearsheimer 2001). Geopolitical thinking is about order and order is in part a cartographic notion. Juliet Fall (2010) once again emphasizes the importance of taken for granted boundaries as the ontological given of contemporary politics. Politics is about the cartographic control of territories, as Megoran (2011) too ponders regarding the first half of the twentieth century, but it also about much more than this, despite the fascination that so many commentators have with the ideal form of the supposedly national territorial state. Part of what geographers bring to the discussion of peace is a more nuanced geographical imagination than that found in so much of international studies (Dalby 2011a).¶ On the other hand much of the discussion of peace sees war as the problem, peace as the solution. Implied in that is geopolitics as the problem, mapping dangers turns out to be a dangerous enterprise insofar as it facilitates the perpetuation of violence by representing other places as threats to which our place is susceptible. But this only matters if this is related to the realist assumptions of the inevitability of rivalry, the eternal search for power as key to humanity’s self-organisation and the assumption that organized violence is the ultimate arbiter (Dalby 2010). Critical geopolitics is about challenging such contextualizations, and as such its relationships to peace would seem to be obvious, albeit as Megoran (2011) notes mostly by way of a focus on what Galtung (1969, 1971) calls negative peace. Given the repeated reinvention of colonial tropes in contemporary Western political discourse such critique remains an essential part of a political geography that grants peoples “the courtesy of political geography” (Mitchell and Smith 1991). Undercutting the moral logics of violence, so frequently relying on simplistic invocations of geographical inevitability, to structure their apologetics, remains a crucial contribution.¶ Both the practical matters of recent history and the scholarly contributions by geographers do not allow simple binary distinctions of peace and war to be used as the premise of either scholarship or political practice. History and scholarship suggest rather that peace is what comes after war; the relationship is temporal, stages in matters of violence, geography and reorganizing facts on the ground. Historically in the era of European warfare, coincident with the rise of modernity, that many people hope is now near its end, peace was that which was imposed by the victors, who in turn were the most powerful in whatever contest was followed by a “peace”. Much recent geographical scholarship suggests that post conflict re-construction is a mode of peace building literally (Kirsch and Flint 2011). But those of us who would challenge war as a human institution, or think about non-violence as a strategy for a better world, will not be satisfied with a geography that is concerned only to pick up the pieces and reconfigure them after they have been shattered by the latest round of organized violence.¶ The key points are that reconstruction is a violent transformation of society, a world where frequently neo-liberal globalization is seen as the imposition of social forms that will not resist its logics. Hence peace is what victors impose, an imperial peace that may eventually be quite welcome to those who benefit from the new arrangements. Is peace then post-war? Perhaps it can be understood in these terms. But the corollary is the equally important point that peace is also frequently what comes before the next war. The normal human situation these days is a matter of non-war, but it is far from clear where security is enforced that this is more than a limited form of negative peace. Without large-scale de-militarization then peace is just what happens between wars. But given this then one additional key point that geographers interested in war need to pay attention to is the matter of how peace fails, how conflict escalates and how geography matters in these processes (Flint et al 2009). Peacekeeping is frequently about geographical separation as the Orwellian names for contemporary walls in terms of lines of peace have it. But there is much more geographical thinking to be done about these matters and the scales of interactions across supposedly peaceful borders, not least where what matters most is state security and its ordering principles rather than local interactions across frontiers. This is so not least because of the marked current trend to build fences around states as the supposed solution to numerous security challenges (Jones 2011).¶ Putting matters into historical context also suggests that war is not what it used to be, at least not after the events of the 1940s. Negative peace is about preventing conflict; non-violence is about political strategies to delegitimise violence, to challenge the human norms of behavior that allow cultures of violence. It is important to link this to the issues of what are now called lawfare (Morrissey 2011), the use of law as power and coercion to set the rules of social and political life too. This has been a key part of the US strategy for a long time; shaping institutions to the benefit of the US economy has been what much of international relations has been about, but the larger benefits of constraining conflict are part of the larger process that international law struggles to legitimize. Rules of conduct matter in the international system and the wide-scale repudiation of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 demonstrated this point clearly