Geography and war, geographers and peace Expanding research and political agendas

This chapter explores the many research and political agendas developed by geographers since 2001 regarding war and peace. It reads as an addendum to a previous essay that reviewed the ways geographers have dealt with war and peace since the establishment of modern Western academic geography. The intimate relations of the modern discipline of geography and military violence through nationalist and imperialist projects are well established. Nonetheless until recently war was rarely a prominent topic of geographical inquiries. Peace even less, although there have always been geographers trying to use geography to promote peace and/or to delegitimate war and violence. This has changed considerably during the past decades, and research and political agendas have been expanding. The chapter is organized in five sections. The first two deal with the general context: changes in war and peace, and changes in academic geographies, before a review of the engagement of geographers with war and peace geographies, as researchers and as activists. The last three sections deal successively with geographers writing about war (and peace), geographers writing about peace (and conflict), and geographers in war and peace.