Synopses & Reviews
Violent Geographies is essential to understanding how the politics of fear, terror, and violence in being largely hidden geographically can only be exposed in like manner. The 'War on Terror' finally receives the coolly critical analysis its ritual invocation has long required.
John Agnew, Professor of Geography, UCLA
Urgent, passionate and deeply humane, Violent Geographies is uncomfortable but utterly compelling reading. An essential guide to a world splintered and wounded by fear and aggression this is geography at its most politically engaged, historically sensitive, and intellectually brave.
Ben Highmore, University of Sussex
This is what a public geography should be all about: acute analysis of momentous issues of our time in an accessible language. Gregory and Pred have assembled a peerless group of critical geographers whose essays alter conventional understandings of terror, violence, and fear. No mere gazetteer, Violent Geographies shows how place, space and landscape are central components of the real and imagined practices that constitute organised violence past and present. If you thought terror, violence, and fear were the professional preserve of security analysts and foreign affairs experts this book will force you to think again.
Noel Castree, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University
A studied, passionate and moving examination of the way in which the violent logics of the War on Terror have so quickly shuttered and reorganized the spaces of this planet on its different scales. From the book emerges a critical new cartography that clearly charts an archipelago of a large multiplicity of wild and tamed places as well as black holes within and between which we all struggle to live.
Eyal Weizman, Director, Goldsmiths College Centre for Research Architecture
Synopsis
Derek Gregory and Allan Pred's" Spaces of Terror is critical geography's rejoinder to The Geographical Dimensions of Terrorism, which came from geography's mainstream establishment. Gregory and Pred, both eminences in the discipline, have put together a great group of young and well established geographers to look at how territory and space delimits and shapes both terrorism and political violence in wide range of places. The overreaching goal is to show how political violence, especially terrorism, "ruptures the simple distinction between 'the global' and the 'local' by folding transnational geopolitical strategies into the intimacies of everyday life." It goes far beyond 9/11 moving backward in history and across the globe to other locales to get at the heightened states of emergency that are occurring everywhere.