"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

We experience violence all our lives, from that very first scream of birth. It has been industrialized and domesticated. Our culture has not become totally accustomed to violence, but accustomed enough. Perhaps more than enough. Geographies of Violence is a critical human geography of the history of violence, from Ancient Rome and Enlightened wars through to natural disasters, animal slaughter, and genocide. Written with incredible insight and flair, this is a thought-provoking text for human geography students and researchers alike.

The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence exposes the spatial processes of racialising, gendering, and classifying populations through the encoded urban infrastructure – from highways cleaving neighbourhoods to laws and policies fortifying even more unbreachable boundaries. This synthesis of narrative and theory resurrects neglected episodes of state violence and reveals how the built environment continues to enable it today within a range of cities throughout the world. Examples and discussions pull from colonial pasts and presents, of old strategic settlements turned major modern cities in the United States and elsewhere that link to the physical and legal structures concentrating a populace into neighbourhoods that prep them for a lifetime of conscripted and carceral service to the State.

Direct, interpersonal violence is a pervasive, yet often mundane feature of our day-to-day lives; paradoxically, violence is both ordinary and extraordinary. Violence, in other words, is often hidden in plain sight. Space, Place, and Violence seeks to uncover that which is too apparent: to critically question both violent geographies and the geographies of violence. With a focus on direct violence, this book situates violent acts within the context of broader political and structural conditions. Violence, it is argued, is both a social and spatial practice. Adopting a geographic perspective, Space, Place, and Violence provides a critical reading of how violence takes place and also produces place. Specifically, four spatial vignettes – home, school, streets, and community – are introduced, designed so that students may think critically how ‘race’, sex, gender, and class inform violent geographies and geographies of violence.

This timely Research Agenda highlights how slow violence, unlike other forms of conflict and direct, physical violence, is difficult to see and measure. It explores ways in which geographers study, analyze and draw attention to forms of harm and violence that have often not been at the forefront of public awareness, including slow violence affecting children, women, Indigenous peoples, and the environment.

The Geography of Ethnic Violence is the first among numerous distinguished books on ethnic violence to clarify the vital role of territory in explaining such conflict. Monica Toft introduces and tests a theory of ethnic violence, one that provides a compelling general explanation of not only most ethnic violence, civil wars, and terrorism but many interstate wars as well. This understanding can foster new policy initiatives with real potential to make ethnic violence either less likely or less destructive. It can also guide policymakers to solutions that endure. The book offers a distinctively powerful synthesis of comparative politics and international relations theories, as well as a striking blend of statistical and historical case study methodologies. By skillfully combining a statistical analysis of a large number of ethnic conflicts with a focused comparison of historical cases of ethnic violence and nonviolence--including four major conflicts in the former Soviet Union--it achieves a rare balance of general applicability and deep insight. Toft concludes that only by understanding how legitimacy and power interact can we hope to learn why some ethnic conflicts turn violent while others do not. Concentrated groups defending a self-defined homeland often fight to the death, while dispersed or urbanized groups almost never risk violence to redress their grievances. Clearly written and rigorously documented, this book represents a major contribution to an ongoing debate that spans a range of disciplines including international relations, comparative politics, sociology, and history.

Through the compelling story of the Tierra Amarilla conflict, David Correia examines how law and property, in general, and a Mexican-period land grant in northern New Mexico, in particular, have been constituted through violence and social struggle. Spain and Mexico populated what is today New Mexico through large common property land grants to sheepherders and agriculturalists. After the U.S.-Mexican War the area saw rampant land speculation and dubious property adjudication with nearly all the grants being rejected by U.S. courts or acquired by land speculators. Of all the land grant conflicts in New Mexico's history, Tierra Amarilla is one of the most sensational, with numerous nineteenth-century speculators ranking among the state's political and economic elite and a remarkable pattern of resistance to land loss by heirs in the twentieth century. Correia narrates a long and largely unknown history of property conflict in Tierra Amarilla characterized by nearly constant violence-night riding and fence cutting, pitched gun battles, and tanks rumbling along the rutted dirt roads of northern New Mexico. The legal geography he constructs is one that includes a remarkable cast of characters: millionaire sheep barons, Spanish anarchists, hooded Klansmen, Puerto Rican freedom fighters-or as J. Edgar Hoover, another of the characters in Correia's story would have called them, "terrorists." By placing property and law at the center of his study, "Properties of Violence" first reveals and then examines a central irony: violence is not the opposite of law but rather is essential to its operation.

This volume offers a critical and creative analysis of the innovations of Deathscapes, a transnational digital humanities project that maps the sites and distributions of custodial deaths in locations such as police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres. An international team of authors take a multidisciplinary approach to questions of race, geographies of state violence and countermaps of resistance across North America, Australia and Europe. The book establishes rich lines of dialogic connection between digital and other media by incorporating both traditional scholarly resources and digital archives, databases and social media. Chapters offer a comprehensive mapping of the key attributes through which racial violence is addressed and contested through digital media and articulate, in the process, the distinctive dimensions of the Deathscapes site. This interdisciplinary volume will be an important resource for scholars, students and activists working in the areas of Cultural Studies, Media and Visual Studies, Indigenous Studies, Refugee Studies and Law.

Geographies of children and young people is a rapidly emerging sub-discipline within human geography. There is now a critical mass of established academic work, key names within academia, growing numbers of graduate students and expanding numbers of university level taught courses. There are also professional training programmes at national scales and in international contexts that work specifically with children and young people. In addition to a productive journal of Children’s Geographies, there’s a range of monographs, textbooks and edited collections focusing on children and young people published by all the major academic presses then there is a substantive body of work on younger people within human geography and active authors and researchers working within international contexts to warrant a specific Major Reference Work on children’s and young people’s geographies. The volumes and sections are structured by themes, which then reflect the broader geographical locations of the research.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography aims to account for the intellectual and worldly developments that have taken place in and around political geography in the last 10 years. Bringing together established names in the field as well as new scholars, it highlights provocative theoretical and conceptual debates on political geography from a range of global perspectives. Discusses the latest developments and places increased emphasis on modes of thinking, contested key concepts, and on geopolitics, climate change and terrorism Explores the influence of the practice-based methods in geography and concepts including postcolonialism, feminist geographies, the notion of the Anthropocene, and new understandings of the role of non-human actors in networks of power Offers an accessible introduction to political geography for those in allied fields including political science, international relations, and sociology