Abstract

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“It has become common place to claim that contemporary wars are fought from a distance: The iconic version is the drone missions flown over Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere from the United States.

Yet wars have been waged at a distance throughout history, and we need a surer sense of the historical curve through which military violence has shaped (and been shaped by) the friction of distance.

But we also need a sharper calibration of wars geography, including the media used to convey the theatre of war to distant audiences, the logistics that convey military forces to those distant theatres, and the introduction of new weapons systems that threaten new forms of time-space compression.

And yet for all these changes the ‘death of distance’ – and the distance of death – in the liquid world of late modernity has been greatly exaggerated, and there remains a stark intimacy to many killing spaces that also requires careful reflection.”