Workshop: Imaginative geographies in contemporary armed conflicts

Organized by:
Adam Baczko (Université Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne), Pamela Colombo (Université Laval), Cléa Pineau (Université Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne), Mathilde Tarif (Université Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne)

Supported by:
-     ERC Social Dynamics of Civil Wars
-     CESSP, Pantheon-Sorbonne University
-     Département de sociologie, Université Laval

Imaginary or imaginative geographies is a concept that have been repeatedly applied to understand recent armed conflicts. This focus on the central role of imagination in the construction of space, especially when space looks inaccessible, remote and unknown, has a double genealogy. On the one hand, John Wright (1947) develops the concept of Terrae Incognitae to account for the geographical unknown that is located beyond our reach as well as for the central role played by imagination in the construction of space. These Terrae Incognitaem place us in front of unexplored spatial regions, created and displayed thanks to the imagination. In parallel to this pioneer work, Edward Said (1979) introduced the term “imaginary geographies” to explore what he has coined as “Orientalism”, an imaginary geography that strengthens the sense of self-identity of the West, allowing at the same time to “dramatize” the distance and the difference between what is close and what is far, between West and East. Such a concept of “imaginary geography” has then been used to conceptualize other geographical areas, as the Balkans for instance (Todorova, 1997).

In the context of the so-called “war on terror”, Derek Gregory (2004) applies the concept of imaginative geographies to account for U.S., British and Israeli practices in the Middle East and Central Asia. In a Foucaldian manner, such an approach emphasizes the relationship between knowledge and power in the construction of space and in the various forms of its appropriation. In line with this innovative approach, numerous research have then focused on spatial representations produced by Western powers (Weizman 2007; Bialasiewicz et al. 2007; Graham 2011; Mundy 2015).

However, if imaginary geographies are ways of organizing world’s knowledge (Tyner 2012), some less hegemonic imaginary geographies tend to be overlooked. Despite significant exceptions (Gregory and Pred 2007), this literature has largely focused on Western Powers and Western sources. Thus, it neglects the way in which local societies receive, contest and reappropriate these discourses, but also how they produce their own imaginative geographies in war settings (Colombo 2017). In this context, we regard imaginary spaces and the “imaginary anthropology” that it carries (Bourdieu 1990) as the result of the superposition and interpenetration of multiple elements: on the one hand, we look at the material impact of war in the spaces of everyday life: on the other, we consider that beliefs, memories, and imaginations of people inhabiting these spaces are also key to understanding these dynamics (Harris 2015). All these elements constitute both the spatiality of the body and the space in which these bodies inhabit (May 2010).

With this workshop, we aim to open a larger debate that contributes to explore the potentialities but also the limits of the concept of imaginative geographies to approach the phenomenon of war. Some of the questions that we would tackle are the following: How and by whom are these representations built? Which are the actors involved in its production? How do these imaginative geographies actually work, materially but also symbolically? How can we actually measure their real impact in war zones? In this same sense, which are the methodological tools available to the researcher to grab these imaginative geographies when doing ethnographic fieldwork? What kind of information do these imaginative geographies actually convey? Last but not least, how can we have access to these discourses?