Monthly Archives: October 2011

Against Spectacle? “Crises” and the Infographic

So there’s been a lot of interesting infographics published recently that help visually represent a host of contemporary issue and crises: from Euro Debt, U.S. income inequality, and the increasingly consolidated power of corporations and banks, to the Afghan quagmire … Continue reading

Posted in #Occupy, Bandits, Critique, Elites, Everyday Life, Guy Debord, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Networks, Political Economy, Power, Spectacle, Violence | 2 Comments

The Country and the City

Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. Oxford: Oxford University Press. At the end of The Country and the City, Raymond Williams offers the reader an appendix on the origins of the keyword “country.” The word, he writes, “is … Continue reading

Posted in Agriculture, Boundaries, City, Critique, Land, Marxism, Place | Comments Off on The Country and the City

Violence in Developing Countries

Cramer, Christopher. 2007. Violence in Developing Countries: War, Memory, Progress. Indiana University Press. Cramer’s book is a strident polemic and methodical critique against widely accepted explanations for contemporary violence. His critique is mainly geared at liberal interpretations of war in … Continue reading

Posted in Frontiers, Historical Materialism, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Marxism, Political Economy, Violence | Comments Off on Violence in Developing Countries

Geographies of the Outlaw

The word “outlaw”—outside of the law—implicitly articulates the intimate relationship between geography and the law. From the perspective of state-makers and capitalists, the groups of outlaws I’m collectively labeling “Motley Crews” (as a shorthand) pose a grave ideological and spatial … Continue reading

Posted in Bandits, Carl Schmitt, Drugs, Elites, Forests, Frontiers, Gender, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Karl Marx, Land, Law, Michel Foucault, Networks, Pirates, Post-Colonial, Power, Primitive Accumulation, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, Terror, The Body, The Sea, The State, Violence | Comments Off on Geographies of the Outlaw