Session title: New Geographies of War

Sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group

Organizers: Steven Radil, University of Idaho; Olivier Walther, University of Southern Denmark

Session description: Recent scholarship that claims that the phenomenon of war is waning stands in stark contrast to the growing ‘new war’ literature that posits that new forms of war have emerged since the end of the Cold War which involves a variety of new political actors and, presumably, new spatial arrangements of political power and political geographic imaginaries. Geographers have played an important role in some debates about war by clarifying the constructed spatial economies of war; drawing attention to the biopolitics of war; showing how war is central to the construction of everyday places and spaces far away from battle zones; and exploring how geographic technology is implicated in the production of some types of war. Although geographers have had less to say about the possibly changing nature of war itself, geographic scholarship has much to offer the ‘new war’ debates.
We envision a session that brings together recent geographic scholarship on war that explores themes such as:

· Geographic approaches to the ‘new war’ hypothesis
· New spatialities of political power
· Emergent transnational political networks and movements
· Innovative geographic methodologies to the study of war
· Contextual approaches to recent civil wars and insurgencies
· Contagion effects of war
· New dimensions to the normalization and pervasiveness of war

We invite papers on these or related topics. Please send proposed paper titles and abstracts (250 words or less) and/or expressions of interest to Steven Radil (sradil@uidaho.edu) and Olivier Walther (ow@sam.sdu.dk) no later than 15 October, 2015.