War Beyond the Battlefield

<p>In an effort to make sense of war <em>beyond</em> the battlefield in studying the wars that were captured under the rubric of the War on Terror this special issue book seeks to explore the complex spatial relationships between war and the spaces that one is not used to thinking of as the battlefield. It focuses on the conflicts that still animate the spaces and places where violence has been launched and that the war has not left untouched. In focusing on war <em>beyond</em> the battlefield it is not that the battlefield as the place where war is waged has gone in smoke or has borne out of importance it is rather the case that the battlefield has been dis-placed re-designed re-shaped and rethought through new spatializing practices of warfare. These new <em>spaces of war</em> – new in the sense that they are not traditionally thought of as spaces where war takes place or is brought to – are television screens cellular phones and bandwidth George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford Texas videogames popular culture sites news media blogs and so on. These spaces of war beyond the battlefield are crucial to understanding what goes on the battlefield in Iraq Afghanistan or in other fronts of the War on Terror (such as the homeland) – to understand how terror has globally been waged beyond the battlefield.</p><p>This book was originally published as a special issue of <em>Geopolitics</em>.</p>