Concepts

This is something of a neologism that – we concede – is clunky and also given to the same parsing of violence for which we critique “aftermaths”. However, “beforemaths” serves as a complementing and counter idea that directs us to the preparatory sites that make war possible. In our research, this has meant focusing on the extraction of minerals that are then used in weapons manufacturing. What a frame of beforemaths brings into view is important: patterns of environmental harm and public health effects at sites contaminated by war debris (Iraq, Gaza, and so forth) are replicated at the sites from which that debris originates in the earth (e.g., the DRC).  

We argue (here) that ‘a key question in the age of advanced military technologies is of the increased extractive burden placed on the Earth, where demand for the materials that make electronics possible signals an integral geos–war relationship that precedes military operation. It is this ‘beforemath’ that makes the toxic aftermath possible, and we know very little of it’. 

this is a phrase that many will be familiar with. In general terms it refers to minerals that are extracted from areas where war is closely connected to mining and the exploitation of land and populations. A lot is written on the production of minerals that power the lives of billions of people depends on coercive and violent conditions for those – including, importantly, the differently vulnerable bodies of children and women – who extract them from the ground. Child labour, enslavement, murder, rape – as well as and ecological and epidemiological ruin – are commonplace, and even central to the continued supply of minerals at prices that maintain profitability further along the supply chain. The term “conflict minerals” is codified in EU and US law as technology critical elements – namely tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold (the “3TGs”) – that are mined in the DRC or neighbouring states. “Conflict free” minerals legislation aims to ensure that raw materials associated with war in central Africa do not enter supply chains.  

We take a different approach. While most conceptualisations of conflict minerals focus on war at source (in mining regions) and on the production of consumer goods (e.g., phones and electric vehicles), we seek to also account for the fact that weapons manufacturers are also reliant on technology critical minerals that therefore “go to war” elsewhere. Even (and especially) if they are certified “conflict free”, they become conflict minerals as components of weapons deployed in warfare in different parts of the world away from their earthly origins.  

The geos is a concept that drives much of our theoretical work on the project. Our understandings draw from the brilliant work of scholars such as Elizabeth Grosz, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Kathryn Yusoff and we seek to further develop the idea in relation to warfare and health. At base, geos refers to the “inert” or “inhuman” geology that forms through the colonising processes of dispossession, extraction, and racialisation. Geos is simultaneously and consequentially an analytical key that can unlock the ways we think about the machinations of (geo)power that produce colonial space. Carefully attending to that which is designated “nonlife” – that is, recognising it, conversely, as the condition for all forms of life – reveals the fictions and fractures in the porosity between putative life/nonlife distinctions. (items in the SCHOLARSHIP tab address the geos in more depth) 

In contrast to geos, “global frame” is a quite simple idea that we have used to analyse the production of military hardware and the waging of war. Recognising that military capacities are drawn from global exchanges in objects, capital, people, and ideas, we situate warfare (for instance, Israel’s ongoing attack on Gaza) in what the geographer Doreen Massey (2004, 12) termed the “power-geometries of globalisation” to show how “certain important elements of capitalist globalisation are organised, coordinated, produced”. With reference to Gaza, this approach has enabled us to substantiate an argument (here) that Palestinian deaths and bombed-out hospitals and schools are Israel’s crimes that are facilitated by international support. 

We also explicate that ‘a global frame does not deflect criticism of Israeli militarism, nor does it reduce the object of politics into a vague or inevitable “global capitalism”. Setting Israel’s war on Gaza within the “power-geometries of globalisation”, instead, as Doreen Massey (2005, 9, 10) put it, “open[s] up to the very sphere of the political” by “rais[ing] questions of the politics of those geographies and of our relationship to and responsibility for them”. By excavating the connections between the violence visited on Palestinians in Gaza and global actors, the possibilities for critique and action are opened out to the security hardware companies, policy makers, and national governments whose complicity consists in enabling Israeli belligerence. These are importantly global trajectories; the challenge is not to allow them to remain part of a flattened-out or un-sited category of geopolitics. As we have shown here, the movements of objects, capital, people, and ideas that make colonial war can be traced, and thus critiqued and obstructed’. 

A phrase that has gained some purchase among geographers and international relations scholars in the past two decades, late modern war denotes a technology-driven mode of warfare enabled by ‘advanced systems of sensing and surveillance from air and space platforms …. and weapons systems revolving around pilotless aircraft, robotic vehicles and precision-guided weapons’ (Gregory 2010, 160). Knowledge of late modern war generally emphasises the speeding up or efficiency of certain processes (e.g., surveillance, targeting), the prevalence of aeriality and remoteness, and the importance of technological innovation (GPS, drones, sensing). 

We have critiqued these emphases as variously anthropocentric, Eurocentric, and technocentric. We consider late modern war from the perspective of the geos, asking What if our analyses of war begin in the ground? What if the point of entry into critique is not the targeting technologies of warfare but the earth and bodies that are targeted? Viewed from the ground through which toxins seep and the bodies whose cells mutate, how are we brought to understand power and the temporal and spatial dimensions of war? In response to these questions we explore the time-spaces of war as not compressed, vertical or remote but enduring, terranean and proximate.  

A particular set of ontological assumptions orientated around the doing of war: military strategy, technological advancement, in/humane violence, il/legal intervention, aeriality, remoteness, targeting, and so forth. We have argued (here) that for both the makers and many critics of war, a “militarized ontology” consists of the shared bounds within which the idea of war is conceived and reproduced. To give a key example, the temporal assumptions of “aftermath” are instructive: what is the aftermath after? The only possible answer to this question is “the formal conclusion of military operations,” thus orientating us once again to an underpinning logic of war is what militaries say it is. 

We work towards an ontology of war tethered not to advanced technologies of war but to the ground and life that are targeted. The ontological move we attempt is driven by an aim to make visible forms of violence directed at the geos and to make accountable the assemblage of agents that distribute that violence. In these terms, the environmental “aftermath” or “fallout” of war is no longer an adjunct to war; it is rather the base from which we understand and critique the effects and practices that we name “war.” 

A term that draws attention to gradual and often less visible forms of violence. The phrase has gained prominence since Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011, 205) that examines ‘a new fatal kind of environmental imprecision to “precision” warfare’ where bombed-out landscapes and exposure to military debris depletes environmental and human health. 

Our research is strongly influenced by this (and other) preceding work but also considers a crucial question of positionality: ‘is violence really slow and ‘unseen’? What does ‘slow’ mean – slow to whom? Whose gaze is privileged?’ (Cahill and Pain 2019, 1058). The deterioration of health in Fallujah, Mosul, Gaza and so forth occurs very much in sight and – one would guess – quite rapidly from the most important perspective, that of one whose life is degraded by the ground made toxic by war.