ubiwar . conflict in n dimensions

It’s been up and running for nearly a month now but Mike Innes has somehow found time between handling a new family and running CTlab (not to mention the day job) to found his own personal blog at terraplexic.net.  Like a lot of Mike’s stuff it’s pretty dense, academic stuff but worth persevering with.

Mike describes his research interests as follows:

Current research and writing focuses on the interface between foreign policy, armed conflict, and spatial dynamics, with special reference to  the sanctuary debate in international relations, and secondary emphases on surrogacy and state sponsorship of non-state groups. The core of this work explores how insurgents, terrorists, and other armed non-state actors proactively exploit and deploy sanctuary concepts, structures, and practices. Extensions include an examination of the way “terrain” has evolved from its physical geographic meaning into a security metaphor applied to the material, human, and informational complexities of modern conflict; the legal and political exceptionalism that arises as a consequence of such nebulous security landscapes; and reconciling the complex spatial dynamics of political violence with the Laws of Armed Conflict.

On his blog, he’s currently exploring the concept of ‘Location Zero’ in a series of posts on ‘politically hyperreal spatial inversions’, or sanctuaries. Here’s an extract:

In this political representation, sanctuaries are also “spatial inversions”. Political hyperreality insists on our awareness of them, but we know of them in their absence. They are voids, gaps, cracks, ellisions. Sites, conditions, and processes of intermediacy, transition, and liminality. If we understand that, then we understand sanctuaries to be in the same conceptual arena as neutral ground/states, buffer zones, traffic deserts, scorched earth, or other geographies of exemption. If, in a security sense, such intermediate spaces are “cracks in the system”, then what’s the system? The entire logic chain demonstrates an imbalance of power, an inversion of meaning.

File under ‘Brainfood’.