Military Geographies
R. Woodward, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Glossary
Militarism The extension of military influence into
civilian social, economic, political, and cultural life.
Military Activities The activities undertaken by
military forces at the behest of the nation-state for
defense and security purposes.
Introduction
Military geography is defined in two distinct ways.
A long-standing definition takes military geography to
be the application of geographic information, tools, and
techniques to the solution of military problems. A more
contemporary definition takes military geographies to
mean the study of the plurality of impacts of military
activities and militarism on space, place, environment,
and landscape. This second definition sees the relation-
ship between militarism and geography as dynamic
and interactive; militarism and military activities are
both geographically expressed, in that they shape the
world, and geographically constituted, in that they come
into being in the form that they do as a consequence of
the material and discursive conditions in which they
evolve.
Both approaches – named here as military geography
and military geographies for the sake of easy distinction –
share a core concern with military activities and mili-
tarism as inherently spatial, and an understanding that
these spatialities are multiple in cause and consequence.
Both approaches to military geography are defined
around military institutions and their practices as their
primary object of inquiry, in contrast to, for example,
political geography’s focus on the state as the location of
and actor in the exercise of military power. Both ap-
proaches recognize that the geographies of militarism
and military activities are features of both the active and
actual pursuit of armed force, and of the processes and
practices surrounding the development and maintenance
of military power beyond the immediate exercise of
violence. Both approaches problematize the binary of war
and peace and focus instead on the consistency of mili-
tary institutions and the variety of ways in which military
power is embedded and expressed.
These two approaches, however, speak to rather dif-
ferent positions on the role of academic inquiry. Tra-
ditional military geography is most usually a scholarship
122
in the service of the military objectives of the state, and
sees its engagement with military institutions as polit-
ically and morally unproblematic or unremarkable. The
approach of military geographies, in contrast, is associ-
ated with a more critical position on the application of
geographical knowledge, with an explicit focus on how
military power is developed and deployed at a range of
scales, and a self-conscious moral positionality on the
military production of specific configurations of social
relations in space. Much of this work takes a highly
critical view of the deployment of material resources
and discursive strategies in the militarized pursuit of
territorial control. It should be noted, though, that the
extent to which antimilitarist and/or pacifist politics are
promoted varies greatly between writers. It should also
be noted that many writers on the spatialities of military
activities and militarism see themselves neither as
military geographers nor even as geographers; that their
research and writing is included for discussion here is a
testament to the interdisciplinary nature of military and
spatial science, rather than to the coherence of intra-
disciplinary labeling.
The terms ‘militarism’, ‘military activities’, and ‘mili-
tarization’ have not been overused in Anglophone human
geography, which arguably has avoided explicit engage-
ment with military institutions and their effects. Mili-
tarism can be defined as the extension of military
influence into civilian social, political, and economic
spheres, with the associated prioritizing, promotion, and
preservation of a nation’s armed forces. Militarization can
be defined as the processes through which military in-
fluence and priorities are extended to civilian life. Mili-
tary activities are defined as something rather different
and more practical, namely the activities that (usually)
the nation-state requires for its defense and security, or
for military offensives and interventions beyond its
borders.
It follows from these definitions that we can dis-
tinguish between the geographies of military activities,
which are the patterning of both material entities and
social relations across space as a consequence of the
production and reproduction of military capabilities; and
the geographies of militarism, defined as the shaping of
civilian space and social relations by military objectives,
rationales, and structures, either as the intended con-
sequence of the extension of military influence into
nominally civilian spheres of social life, or as a by-
product (perhaps unintended, sometimes not) of that
process.

A Brief History of Geography’s
Engagement with Military Activities and
Militarism
Military endeavor requires geographical knowledge;
the conquest of territory and the assertion of control
over space through violent means makes necessary an
understanding of that territory’s physical features and
social structures. Organized warfare has therefore always
conscripted geographical knowledge and the tools,
techniques, and labor of geographers. As modes of war-
fare have evolved and changed, in terms of both the
objectives and targets of military violence, and in terms
of the development of technologies of organized violence,
so also have the modes of geographical knowledge
changed. Furthermore, ways of conceptualizing space
according to the requirements of military strategy have
also evolved, in conjunction with technological and
objective development of war. This connection between
geographers and military endeavor is identifiable across a
range of historical contexts, from the ancient Chinese
world to the conquests of medieval Arab powers.
In nineteenth-century Western Europe the relationship
between the imperial state and the emergent discipline of
geography was close and mutually constitutive; in order to
facilitate imperial expansion, the territorial objects of de-
sire needed to be mapped, described, and known. For
example, the British and German imperial adventures of
the late nineteenth century could not have proceeded
without the input of Halford MacKinder and Friedrich
Ratzel. During the global conflicts of 1914–18 and 1939–
45, in both Britain and the United States of America,
geographers contributed to the war effort through the
compilation of knowledge about overseas territories for
their respective governments and military strategists.
In the post-World War II era in Anglophone and
Francophone human geography, specifically from the
1960s onwards, we can identify a rupture in the trajectory
of military geography, the origins of the two rather dif-
ferent interpretations of the subdiscipline identified
above. A more traditional and conservative military
geography has proceeded virtually unchanged from its
nineteenth-century roots. So, for example, the appli-
cation of geographical concepts to military endeavors
continues to the present with the engagement of strat-
egists within the Israeli Defense Forces with spatial
theory to facilitate military tactics and strategy in the
Occupied Territories, with the use of geographic infor-
mation system (GIS) and remote sensing and other visual
imaging techniques in Afghanistan by the armed forces of
the United States and allies in their search for Taliban
operatives, and with the descriptive physical and cultural
geographies of Iraq produced by American military
geographers in assistance to military occupation of the
country.
Military Geographies 123
A more critical military geography has its genesis in
the emergence of radical and dissident politics emergent
in the 1960s, inspired by social change, civil rights
movements, and the rediscovery within the social sci-
ences and human geography of Marxist theory as a
conceptual underpinning for a geography alert to social
justice issues. Critiques, for example, of United States
Armed Forces’ military strategies during the Vietnam
War, particularly those targeted against civilians,
emphasized an oppositional and critical antimilitarism
politics in their descriptions of the effects of military
activities on agricultural areas. However, with the ex-
ception of a self-identified applied military geography,
Anglophone human geography to an extent disengaged
with questions of militarism and its geographies per se,
attending instead to a focus on the outcomes of military
activities and the role of the state.
Themes in Contemporary Military
Geography
The range of themes that have emerged as either part of
an explicit military geography/geographies project, or
that could be incorporated within these distinct bodies of
work, are diverse. Eight stand out and are discussed here.
A first theme is that of the historical geography of past
military campaigns, a ‘terrain and tactics’ approach which
takes as its area of study the influence of the impacts of
geology, geomorphology, topography, biogeography,
weather events, and climate on military campaigns and
on specific battles. This approach is identified strongly
with both traditional military geography, and also with
geographical military history. Allied to this theme are
studies which seek to assess the resulting impacts on
landscapes and landforms of military activities, including
the construction of fortifications and the effects of ex-
plosive munitions, and attempts to bring contemporary
understanding to bear on past military events through
archaeological and geoarchaeological tools and tech-
niques. A key feature of much of this body of work is the
use of topographic analysis tools and methodologies to
establish how the natural environment affects the con-
duct of military campaigns. Evaluations of contemporary
and historical geographies of military events have also
examined the impacts on human populations of armed
conflict and organized violence. Work in this area has
focused, for example, on the disruptions to economic
development and social cohesion, on health, welfare and
education systems, on disease epidemics, and on indus-
trial and agricultural productivity disruptions caused by
warfare.
A second theme follows from this, and concerns the
development of GIS tools and methodologies explicitly
for military use. Particularly significant here are mapping
124 Military Geographies
systems – many of which have developed through col-
laborative military–academic endeavor – techniques for
terrain analysis for combat purposes, and strategies for
visualizing terrain and territory. Changing modes of
warfare have been instrumental here in pushing the de-
velopment of techniques for visualizing and mapping
urban warfare environments, as a prerequisite for military
operations in urban terrain.
A third theme – and significant for revealing the na-
ture of human geography’s engagement with military
issues – is that on the spatialities of the pursuit of armed
conflict, and the consequences of that. Although usually
identified in disciplinary terms as a feature of political
geography and critical geopolitics (few writing on these
issues would self-identify as military geographers), it
merits mention because it constitutes a coherent body of
work around military issues. Topics within this theme
would include the causes of armed dispute between
states, the wider regional and global power balances
predicated on military interventions, and the con-
sequences for territorial integrity, borders, and bound-
aries of the pursuit of the state’s objectives through armed
violence by nation-states. A critical geopolitics literature
has emerged which assesses the militarized activities of
nation-state and subnational groupings in terms of their
performative and representational strategies.
A fourth theme engages with the consequences for the
spatiality of military activities of changing modes of
warfare and motivations for the deployment of armed
force. There is much debate within military science and
related fields as to whether observable differences in
the means of imposing armed force since the end of the
Cold War (1989 onwards) have constituted some sort of
revolution in military affairs. This debate centers around
whether changes in military practice and capabilities
have been solely or almost exclusively technologically
driven, including developments in weapons, communi-
cations, intelligence and surveillance systems, in trans-
portation and mobilities, and in strategies for force
deployment, or whether this revolution is more funda-
mental to the causes of armed conflict. This alternative
argument sees post-Cold War conflicts around the world
as remarkable for the rupture they represent with the
past in terms of their origins, rationales, civilian in-
volvement, and symmetry relative to opposing forces.
Shifts include (but are not limited to) the rise of ethno-
nationalist conflicts, of religiously identified conflicts, and
resource wars (particularly over oil), and at a more ab-
stract level, changing notions of security including en-
vironmental and resource security. A good example of
how the spatialities of changing modes and motivations
for armed conflict have been addressed is research and
writing on the urbanization of military activities, in-
cluding weapons systems and force deployment tactics
developed specifically to counter an unequal opposing
force in urban terrain, strategies of spatial planning at the
urban and regional levels explicitly to counter and de-
fend against new forms of armed violence, and strategies
for the targeting of urban infrastructure (urbicide) as an
explicit tactic for armed forces.
A fifth theme concerns the economic geographies of
military activity and military resource use. All military
forces are major users of land and material resources, and
the utilization of both shapes both the form and function
of militaries themselves, and the form and function of
affected localities. In terms of land use, the military
ownership and control of large areas of land is arguably
necessary for the maintenance and reproduction of
military power. Such land uses may be very extensive
indeed – commentators estimate that an average of 1% of
all land is used for military purposes in many advanced
capitalist nation-states. Such land uses may be contested
of course, with competing claims for land use drawing
heavily on alternative visions of both the material utility
and sociocultural significance of such spaces. In addition,
military land uses extend to overseas bases; the United
States Armed Forces, for example, maintain a ring of
military bases spanning around the globe. Again, inter-
pretations of these land uses are contested; are these a
legitimate strategy for securing the interests of the
United States, or a strategy for global hegemony forced
by overwhelming military economic power interests? The
consequences of both domestic and foreign military
bases, in terms of their impacts on the economic geog-
raphies of localities and regions, are marked by their
unpredictability. The type of facility, the nature of a
region in which it is located, and the strength and density
of the economic, political, and sociocultural connections
which embed a facility in its locality will profoundly
affect the military economic geographies imprinted upon
space and place.
The economic geographies of militarism extend also
to the defense industry, that sector engaged with the
manufacture of weapons systems and other military
matérial, and the networks and supply chains through
which components are brought together, and manu-
factured objects distributed nationally and globally. Re-
search work on the changing economic geographies of
the defense industrial sector has emphasized linkages
between an increasingly globalized industrial sector and
national state security objectives, highlighting the ten-
sions between the two. Of particular significance here is
the capacity of the defense industrial sector to dictate
military force deployment capabilities at a quite funda-
mental level, through supply-led economies within the
sector. The dependency of manufacturing regions on
defense industrial activity has also been analyzed,
with the technological developments in weapons systems
driving a changing geography of production and
distribution alongside trends in the distribution of

manufacturing and R&D nationally and globally. Also
significant here is research which suggests the limited
capacity most advanced capitalist economies have for
defense industrial conversion and diversification. Most
recently, the privatization and outsourcing of state se-
curity functions under neoliberal economic regimes,
particularly in logistics and services for military per-
sonnel on base and in theater, raises profound questions
about the movement of the locus of control over security
provision away from the nation-state, that institution
which traditionally has had sole legitimate authority over
the deployment of violence. This issue is particularly
marked with the increased reliance of private security
personnel to perform security-related functions in lieu of
enlisted troops.
A sixth theme concerns the social geographies of
militarism and military activities, an issue revolving
around civilian responses to and engagements with mili-
tary presence, practices, and personnel, and around the
social and cultural geographies produced, expressed, and
embodied by military personnel themselves. The social
and cultural consequences of military bases, for example,
impact on local populations in ways dependent not only
on the nature of the economic linkages between a facility
and its host population, but also on social relations beyond
the base wire. Degrees of harmony and integration at one
extreme, and over social disruption and abuse at another
mark the variability of impacts. Military bases, for
example, are commonly associated with high levels of
dependency among local populations on illegal and un-
regulated economic activities, such as trade in drugs,
alcohol and armaments, and prostitution. The abuse and
exploitation of certain local social groups, particularly
women, by soldiers is a feature of many overseas bases.
Domestic military bases generate their own social re-
lations of security and danger, trust and mistrust.
Geographies of resistance and opposition also follow
the military control of space. Such activities, ranging
from localized disputes over specific military uses for
particular sites to wider campaigns against a military
presence in itself, are significant for the alternative con-
ceptualizations of the use of space which they invoke.
Protests against specific uses include resistance to activ-
ities on the grounds of their impacts on, for example,
natural environments, valued landscapes, and social and
economic well-being. Antimilitarist protests against a
military presence (such as the US military presence in
Okinawa) or against specific military installations (such as
nuclear weapons systems, or military intelligence sites)
invoke moral objections to a more abstract notion of the
militarization of space and place.
A further set of cultural and social geographies of
militarism and military activities relate to the spatialities
of gender relations and gender identities within military
institutions. Military institutions, particularly residential
Military Geographies 125
military bases, have social dynamics that may be starkly
gendered in their spatial expression, and these in turn
may be overlain by military–civilian differences. An ex-
ample would be the differential access to and use of space
in those military installations which function simul-
taneously as military garrison, military installation, and
domestic residence for the families of military personnel.
The gender dynamics within armed forces are themselves
spatialized through the designation of gendered spaces,
and the construction and reproduction of gendered
military identities through the use of space. An example
would be the embodied practices of military training as a
means of constituting particular military masculine
identities, and the fact of the practice of this across
challenging spaces and landscapes.
A seventh theme is that of the environmental impacts
of military activities, and the politics of military en-
vironmentalism. Armed forces are key users of global
natural resources, including energy resources. Further-
more, military activities have pronounced environmental
effects in both conflict scenarios, and in nonconflict
situations through the environmental effects of the on-
going maintenance of the capacity of military institutions
to exercise lethal force. There is little consensus as to
whether a value judgment can be made about conflict
versus nonconflict environmental damage; although the
environmental impacts of armed conflict can be profound
– witness the torching of Kuwaiti oil wells during the
1991 Gulf War – the ongoing and normalized use of
domestic and overseas facilities by military facilities
carries with it the risk of long-standing and deleterious
environmental impact.
The environmental impacts of military activities take
many forms. Pollution is a key issue and includes both the
visible rubbish and detritus of military activities such as
the remains of ordnance (and unexploded ordnance) on
training areas, and the hazardous littering of unexploded
ordnance, particularly landmines, in former conflict sites.
Nonvisible pollution hazards follow military forces around
the contemporary world, and is the biggest single en-
vironmental issue associated with military bases. Chemical
pollution includes toxicity to natural environments from
the fuels, lubricants, solvents, and explosives used in the
maintenance and testing of military vehicles, munitions,
and weapons systems. Chemical and radiological hazards
have been noted from the use of specific weapons, such as
the use of the Agent Orange herbicide by the US Armed
Forces during the Vietnam War, and the use of depleted
uranium-tipped projectiles during the 1991 Gulf War. The
testing of nuclear weapons has in effect rendered some
former testing sites uninhabitable, places such as Bikini
Atoll in the South Pacific, and the weapons testing grounds
of the Southwestern United States. A further environ-
mental impact is that produced through environmental
modification, caused by explosives impacts in testing and in
126 Military Geographies
conflict, the destruction of specific habitats and the impact
of noise, footfall, and tracked vehicular movements.
The politics of military environmentalism have pro-
voked critical commentary from geographers interested in
the military representation of armed conflict and related
activities. At what point do the environmental impacts of
military activities come to be described as destructive? Are
there distinctions to be drawn on moral grounds between
the environmental impacts of military activities versus
other industrial, commercial, or leisure-related land-uses?
Arguably, armed forces are just one of many institutions,
particularly in advanced capitalist nation-states, which
cause both environmental modification and damage, and
which seek to justify or rationalize such damage with
reference to the necessity of such activities. What is sig-
nificant here is not so much that environmental damage
occurs but the reference to security and defense objectives
as an overriding justification for such impacts.
The eighth and final theme to be considered here is
the cultural geographies of militarism, particularly the
construction and representation of military landscapes.
Anglophone human geography’s focus on landscape as a
form that is both constructed and legible has provided a
powerful impetus to studies of the ways in which military
power is physically inscribed onto landscapes. The mili-
tarized construction and representation of landscapes is a
strategic act. Work on the impacts of military nuclear
testing in the Southwest USA, for example, emphasizes the
representational practices of the US Armed Forces and
Department of Defense in describing these desert areas
as uninhabitable and unproductive spaces, a strategy of
legitimation for the testing of nuclear weapons and a
counter to local indigenous representations of this space as
a living, working, productive environment. Another ex-
ample would be the significant body of work that has built
up around sites of memory, mourning, and memorializa-
tion, which fix into (usually urban) landscapes specific
interpretations of past conflicts (see, for example, the
strategies of memorialization that followed World War I,
in the construction of war graves in former battlefields,
and the placing of war memorials in cities, towns, and
villages back home). Notable too is the fluidity of meaning
around such places, visible in the changing national
interpretations of former Nazi concentration camps in
Central Europe, and the incorporation within national
monuments of mourning and memorialization of multiple
categories of participants of former wars. No longer are
soldiers the only ones so honored.
Current Issues of Theory and Practice in
the Study of Military Geographies
Four issues of theory and practice in the study of military
geographies dominate current work in the field. The first
is recognition of the need for a theorized approach to the
pursuit of military power across space, one which rec-
ognizes the conceptualization of space and spatiality
deployed by military forces (whether in operations or in
basing) and is alert to the power geometries that such
conceptualizations entail. The second issue relates to
access to information and data on military activities,
across the spectrum of such activities. A paucity of in-
formation on activities and impacts across the social,
environmental, and economic spheres has long limited
the nature of investigations into military geographies and
the geographies of militarism. The third issue is the
politics of the engagement of the academy with military
power and military institutions. For a more traditional
military geography, that engagement is relatively un-
problematic. Within the critical political tradition in
human geography, along a spectrum from pacifism to
critical observation, issues of engagement with military
institutions raise moral questions about the role of aca-
demic geographers. Sometimes those issues are starkly
clear – whether or not researchers undertake research
funded by military institutions, for example. Sometimes
those issues are more complex; this encyclopedia, for
example, is published by Reed Elsevier, a multinational
corporation which through a subsidiary company ran a
major biennial arms trade exhibition in London, the
Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEi).
This connection led to debate within and beyond geog-
raphy on whether academics should support through
their publishing in Reed Elsevier books and journals, a
key player in the international arms trade. The fourth
issue – and this is entirely speculative – concerns the
influence of wider global political developments on
philosophical and conceptual trajectories within human
geography. As the consequences become more apparent
of the enormous human costs of the unrestrained use of
military force by the US state and allies in Afghanistan
and the Middle East, we should consider carefully how
the discipline of geography can respond adequately to
what many name the ‘Long War’, what it might mean to
place war, and the outcomes of armed violence at the
center of our geographical inquiries.
See also: Critical Geopolitics; Geography, History of;
Geopolitics.
Further Reading
Caldwell, D. R., Ehlen, J. and Harmon, R. S. (eds.) (2005). Studies in
Military Geography and Geology. London: Kluwer.
Clout, H. and Gosme, C. (2003). The naval intelligence handbooks: A
monument in geographical writing. Progress in Human Geography
27, 153--173.
Flint, C. (ed.) (2005). The Geography of War and Peace: From Death
Camps to Diplomats. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gilbert, E. and Cowan, D. (eds.) (2007). War, Citizenship, Territory.
London: Routledge.
Graham, S. (ed.) (2004). Cities, War and Terrorism: Towards an Urban
Geopolitics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kaldor, M. (2000). Global Insecurity: Restructuring the Global Military
Sector. London: Pinter.
Kuletz, V. (1998). The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in
the American West. London: Routledge.
Lacoste, Y. (1973). La Géographie, c¸a sert, d’abord, à Faire la Guerre.
Paris: Maspéro.
Mamadouh, V. (2005). Geography and war, geographers and peace.
In Flint, C. (ed.) The Geography of War and Peace: From Death
Camps to Diplomats, pp 26--60. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Military Geographies 127
Palka, E. J. and Galgano, F. A. (eds.) (2000). The Scope of Military
Geography: Across the Spectrum from Peacetime to War. New York:
McGraw-Hill, Primis Custom Publishing.
Shapiro, M. J. (1997). Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Woodward, R. (2004). Military Geographies. Oxford: Blackwell.
Woodward, R. (2005). From military geography to militarism’s
geographies: Disciplinary engagements with the geographies of
militarism and military activities. Progress in Human Geography
29(6), 718--740.