Critical Military Geographies

‘Critical military geography’ can be loosely defined as a subsection of critical military studies that is attuned to space and place. Critical military studies (CMS) as a broader project is interdisciplinary in its approach, and is concerned primarily with an examination of militaries, militarism, and military power. Scholarship in CMS spans across international relations, politics, sociology, history, the creative arts, and of course geography. Critical military geography emerged in counterpoint to a more traditional military geography which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and which is concerned with the application of geographic information, tools, and techniques to the solution of military problems. The critical military geography approach, in contrast, centers the power relations through which military phenomena are geographically constituted and expressed. For this reason, critical military geography parallels the approaches of critical geopolitics and critical sociologies of the military as responses to older traditions within, respectively, political geography and sociology. Geographers have shed light on the myriad ways in which military phenomena are innately geographical; how they are rooted in place and spatially and temporally contingent, as well as practiced through and in particular bodies.