The Political Geographies of Community in Warscapes

Abstract

This article talks about the condition of people living in warscapes, i.e. times and spaces of war in which the landscapes of the everyday are characterised by widespread violence, volatility, and insecurity. It argues that the political subjectivity of people living in warscapes is – in part – shaped by how the multiple political orders present in a place of war configure the political community and its territory by managing military violence. In this sense, the paper contributes to previous research in political geography that has provided a spatial reading of the rich debate on living with/in war developed across anthropology, international relations, and peace and conflict studies. Without discarding the importance of other intertwined dimensions, such as agency, gender and sexism, or localised dynamics of war, the analysis refocuses the geographical thread of this debate towards the linkage between body, place, and territory as the space of the political community. To do so, the article draws from Roberto Esposito’s work on community and immunity to conceptualise the role of violence and space in producing political communities as delineated groups of beings sharing some individual properties in common. Bringing this conceptual insight into empirical focus through fieldwork methods and the case of the wars in Karenni state, Myanmar, the article shows how paradigms and practices of violence produce the territory of the political community and, in so doing, produce also forms of human life considered disposable and/or expendable/extractable in warscapes.