{"title":"Late modern war and the <i>geos</i>: The ecological 'beforemaths' of advanced military technologies.","authors":"Mark Griffiths, Kali Rubaii","doi":"10.1177/09670106241265636","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article develops the idea that late modern war's relationship with the <i>geos</i> (the ground and the life it sustains) is doubly destructive. While part of this is recognized in a recent focus on slow violence and ecological aftermaths, there is little consideration of the 'beforemath', or the sites of extraction that make advanced military technologies possible. Drawing attention to mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the article connects military technologies to arms manufacturers and their use of extracted minerals (e.g. cobalt, tantalum, copper, uranium). Shared patterns of environmental and public health effects across parts of Iraq, Gaza and the DRC indicate the doubly destructive nature of late modern war's relationship with the <i>geos</i>: toxic materials threaten life <i>after</i> war as the deposits of bombardment and <i>before</i> war as mineral commodities at the beginning of arms supply chains. The article explicates how a perspective from the beforemath radically refigures the ways we think about war and spatiality, temporality, and the range of bodies affected in ways that promise a fuller understanding of the violence distributed by practices of late modern war.</p>","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"56 1","pages":"38-57"},"PeriodicalIF":2.8000,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11735307/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Security Dialogue","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106241265636","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2024/10/18 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article develops the idea that late modern war's relationship with the geos (the ground and the life it sustains) is doubly destructive. While part of this is recognized in a recent focus on slow violence and ecological aftermaths, there is little consideration of the 'beforemath', or the sites of extraction that make advanced military technologies possible. Drawing attention to mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the article connects military technologies to arms manufacturers and their use of extracted minerals (e.g. cobalt, tantalum, copper, uranium). Shared patterns of environmental and public health effects across parts of Iraq, Gaza and the DRC indicate the doubly destructive nature of late modern war's relationship with the geos: toxic materials threaten life after war as the deposits of bombardment and before war as mineral commodities at the beginning of arms supply chains. The article explicates how a perspective from the beforemath radically refigures the ways we think about war and spatiality, temporality, and the range of bodies affected in ways that promise a fuller understanding of the violence distributed by practices of late modern war.
期刊介绍:
Security Dialogue is a fully peer-reviewed and highly ranked international bi-monthly journal that seeks to combine contemporary theoretical analysis with challenges to public policy across a wide ranging field of security studies. Security Dialogue seeks to revisit and recast the concept of security through new approaches and methodologies.