Suchergebnisse

Of the 13,000 works of art in the Canadian War Museum's holdings, only 64 display dead bodies. Prevailing explanations of this absence revolve around respect for the dead and ethical responsibility to avoid the glorification of war. And yet death and destruction are pervasive in war. The irony is that one leaves the museum with the sense that war does not produce corpses, or at least not very many of them. Nowhere is this irony more evident than in the Canadian War Museum's armaments collection, described as 'the way in which human ingenuity has been applied to the science of war, creating weapons and other devices to attack, protect and kill', but with only technical information about weapon calibre and capacities provided. This article describes an effort to dig up the dead. Studying the form and function of the labels accompanying weapons, I argue that seemingly mundane technical specifications classify and standardize certain kinds of bodily injury and death, and make the bodies destroyed by war present. Overall, arguing that injury and death are in the (technical) details, I challenge the assumption that a focus on technological devices sanitizes war. Instead, I propose a way to investigate and interrogate how death and injury in war are calibrated and embodied in the standards that make weapons 'conventional'.

This paper argues that attempts by theories of globalization to overcome the "territorial trap" have failed. Describing how the modern state emerged with two interrelated territories-a political concept about bounded jurisdiction and public good that over time is effaced but reinforced as territory is defined as brute, physical terrain-it shows that the assumption in globalization theories that territory is the state's physical area entrenches the normative defense of the territorial state as the framework of political order. The consequence is that overcoming the territorial trap not only requires uncovering how and why territory becomes an assumed political ideal, but also how and why this trap produces the subsequent trap of understanding territory primarily as the "physical substratum" of the sovereign state. Globalization theories' analysis of political transformation must therefore focus not only on the "permeability" of territorial borders, but whether and how evolving notions of global space might be providing a different political theory. A preliminary discussion of efforts to uncover how an alternative global spatial principle is reassembling political authority suggests a possible means of escape and way forward. Adapted from the source document.

Buzan & Hansen (2009) point to the role of historical claims in constituting disciplinary identities. Examining their intellectual history, this article evaluates how their use of an evolution metaphor establishes 'history' and how this history makes 'security' and 'security studies' intelligible. The article demonstrates that although Buzan & Hansen establish International Security Studies as being comprised of diverse theoretical approaches, they do so with a model of history that sanctions a realist conception of security. More broadly, Buzan & Hansen compel an exploration of the tensions between history and genealogy in security studies.