Abstract

Modern Geography and modern war have long been locked in a deadly embrace: but what happens when we move outside the usual realms of geopolitics, strategy and targeting? This presentation recovers geographies of medical treatment and evacuation in four war zones: the Western Front in the First World War, the deserts of North Africa in the Second World War, Afghanistan 2001-2018, and Syria 2012-2018. The movement of casualties form the Western Front inaugurated the modern military-medical machine that, over time, became steadily faster, smoother and more effective until, in Afghanistan most military casualties reached hospital within the ‘golden hour’. But this impression of progress has to be revised once Afghan casualties are taken into account – both combatant and civilian – and it is dispelled altogether by the fate of the sick and wounded in rebel-controlled areas of Syria under siege from Russian, Syrian and Iranian forces. Does this mean that for most of its victims there is no escape from the boundless violence of modern war and its bloody geographies?

Professor Derek Gregory is Peter Wall Distinguished Professor at the University of British Colombia in Vancouver. He specialises in the spatial modalities of late modern war and the cultural and political geographies of bombing across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on the Middle East, but also Europe and the Far East. His works include Geographical Imaginations (1994), The Colonial Present (2004) and War Cultures (2008).