Oh my body, make of me always a man who questions! (Fanon, 1967: 232) What happens to research wh... more Oh my body, make of me always a man who questions! (Fanon, 1967: 232) What happens to research when the researched become the researchers? (Smith, 2013: 183)
Things start to become militarized when their legitimacy depends on their association with milita... more Things start to become militarized when their legitimacy depends on their association with military goals. When something becomes militarized, it appears to rise in value. Militarization is seductive.
This essay points to some of the ways that militaries are focused on money and economics, and add... more This essay points to some of the ways that militaries are focused on money and economics, and addresses what this means for understanding the entanglements of security and finance. We cannot think about security in the contemporary moment without also thinking about militaries and war, and it is only by addressing how military power engages money and finance that can we better understand how insecurity is enacted.
In this article, we trace the interconnections between humanitarianism and militarism. We highlig... more In this article, we trace the interconnections between humanitarianism and militarism. We highlight the significance of a geographical perspective in emphasizing the spatial and multiscalar dimensions of this changing relationship, particularly in Western states. In doing so, we reveal the violent geographies produced through militarized humanitarianism and demonstrate the ways political violence can be obscured through invocations of humanitarianism. We look at five overlapping lines of enquiry: the way humanitarianism is used to modulate war; the rationalization of military intervention as humanitarian; military deployment in response to humanitarian crises; the military take-up of humanitarian-style practices; and weapons development and humanitarianism.
In this article, we trace the interconnections between humanitarianism and militarism. We highlig... more In this article, we trace the interconnections between humanitarianism and militarism. We highlight the significance of a geographical perspective in emphasizing the spatial and multiscalar dimensions of this changing relationship, particularly in Western states. In doing so, we reveal the violent geographies produced through militarized humanitarianism and demonstrate the ways political violence can be obscured through invocations of humanitarianism. We look at five overlapping lines of enquiry: the way humanitarianism is used to modulate war; the rationalization of military intervention as humanitarian; military deployment in response to humanitarian crises; the military take-up of humanitarian-style practices; and weapons development and humanitarianism.
This book review symposium interrogates Joel Wainwright's recent text Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Mili... more This book review symposium interrogates Joel Wainwright's recent text Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought (Palgrave Macillan 2013). Overtly, this text is a scathing critique of the Bowman Expeditions, launched in 2006 with several million dollars of funding from the Foreign Military Study Office (FMSO) of the US Army. Two years later, and well into the first expedition in Oaxaca, Mexico, several groups from Oaxaca responded, accusing the Bowman Expedition of “Geopiracy” and of tricking the indigenous communities involved. In mounting a robust critique of the Bowman Expeditions, in this text Wainwright simultaneously takes on several other pressing issues in the discipline of geography, among them the militarization of geography, power, ethics, transparency and consent in fieldwork, the supposed objectivity and value-less-ness of mapping, and the tepid response to the Bowman controversy mustered by the AAG. In this review symposium a diverse group of ...
Page 1. Emily Gilbert Beyond Survival? ... In Canada, wilderness has also played a central role i... more Page 1. Emily Gilbert Beyond Survival? ... In Canada, wilderness has also played a central role in the national imaginary, and it has been relentlessly repackaged and remarketed for domestic and foreign consumption (Mackey 2002; O'Brian and White 2007). ...
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2008
In the Space of Theory is a difficult but important read. Matt Sparke has written a theoretically... more In the Space of Theory is a difficult but important read. Matt Sparke has written a theoretically challenging and empirically rich monograph which presents an articulate and compelling case for the necessity of critical human geography within wider debates in critical theory. Through examples ranging from First Nation land-rights claims, to the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement, to the current war in Iraq, Sparke challenges the hyphen between `nation' and `state' by inserting the hidden hyphen in geography to render the term ...
What is changing? This: the contradictions and predations of patriarchal imperialist capitalism, ... more What is changing? This: the contradictions and predations of patriarchal imperialist capitalism, and of the deeply racist and gendered material and symbolic order it produces, have enabled an accelerating, unrelenting, unfettered extractive stance toward the planet, its ecosystems and natural resources, and the plant and animal species and human beings that inhabit it. That stance has not only resulted in increasingly outrageous inequalities and concentrations of wealth; it has gotten us to the brink of climate catastrophe, ecosystem collapse, and a vast, literally unimaginable intensification and expansion of human immiseration and suffering. So what is changing in security (if not in security studies, critical or otherwise) is everything -from the entire context of stable planetary ecosystems that gave rise to the way our world is politically, economically and socially structured, to our understandings of those structures, and to our models and theories of what constitutes security within them, be it state security or human security.
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2020
My revised and updated entry on Liberalism for the second edition of the International Encycloped... more My revised and updated entry on Liberalism for the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by Audrey Kobayashi.
Borders are being stretched as they are deterritorialized, reterritorialized and extra-territoria... more Borders are being stretched as they are deterritorialized, reterritorialized and extra-territorialized. But borders are not only being relocated elsewhere: just as they are extended they are also snapped back into place in order to limit the rights of travellers and migrants, and to deny the accountability of border officials. This elasticity—expansion but also contraction—is the focus of this paper, with particular attention to the Canada–US border with respect to how legal jurisdiction is being reworked territorially, and the ways that the law gets attached to particular bodies. Three contemporary case studies are examined: the Safe Third Country Agreement, the Shiprider program, and the expansion of preclearance programs. While each of these cases is quite different in that they deal with asylum seekers, cross-border policing, and extraterritorial customs programs, together they illustrate how borders are being made elastic, and with what political implications.
Little academic attention has been directed towards the victims of
terrorism. This article begins... more Little academic attention has been directed towards the victims of terrorism. This article begins to do so by interrogating how victims get compensated, and for how much, in North America and Western Europe. This article examines compensation from three vantage points. First, attention is directed to the variety of state programmes that have been mobilised over the last several decades to build individual and state resilience. I will suggest, however, that many of these programmes fall short, as they fail to meet victim needs. Indeed, as I subsequently illustrate, public and private philanthropy are playing an increasingly important role in providing victim support, sometimes superseding state contributions. Yet while they speak to an affective response that emerges out of and reinforces community building, they are also highly uneven and can entrench existing social inequalities. I then turn to examine the turn to the courts as a means both for recouping further compensation and for achieving some kind of accountability. Notably, the drive to provide victims with other mechanisms for compensation has led to new legislative mechanisms that are reshaping geopolitics by reworking the principle of sovereign immunity. Together, these examples of compensation trouble simplistic characterisations of victimhood while also illustrating how both victims and terrorism are being made governable, often with chilling consequences. They also expose the limits of the state and of state sovereignty.
Recent events have put human encounters with state sovereignty at borders under intense scrutiny ... more Recent events have put human encounters with state sovereignty at borders under intense scrutiny from governments, media, and academics alike. Over 40,000 people died attempting to cross a border from 2006 to 2015 and a record 65 million people were displaced by conflict around the world in 2015 (http:// missingmigrants.iom.int/). These 40,000 þ deaths are not the direct results of wars where humans become the casualties of stateto-state conflicts or internal strife. Rather, they are a consequence of states expanding the reach of their security and detention practices to capture, intercede, or make intentionally perilous the movements of people in search of better opportunitiesdor often just basic safety and human dignitydfor themselves and their family. There are almost 70 border walls around the world, up from 15 in 198915 in (Vallet, 2014, and these are just the most visible physical manifestations of what is much wider set of state practices to control movement such as deployments of more border guards, seaborne patrols, and investments in new technologies to monitor more comprehensively events within state space, at the edges of their territories, and beyond.
In US counterinsurgency doctrine, money has been characterized as “ammunition” and as a “weapons ... more In US counterinsurgency doctrine, money has been characterized as “ammunition” and as a “weapons system.” Money is being wielded to win over the “hearts and minds” of the population, and to protect the lives of the occupying forces. Soldiers are taking on greater responsibility for spending money on reconstruction and development projects on the battlefield. Billions of dollars have been spent by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan on a wide range of projects including building schools, developing infrastructure, agricultural assistance, as well as microfinance. But military doctrine now extends to helping implement free-market economies, supporting business creation, setting-up banking facilities and promoting entrepreneurialism. In fact, economic development has been recast as a constitutive form of combat, not simply as a supplement to conventional warfare, or as part of post-conflict reconstruction. The use of money as a “weapons system” speaks both to a different kind of military and a different kind of war. Fighting and violence have not been replaced or even displaced, but are joined with new strategies and tactics that sit uneasily side by side. As soldiers have been retooled to be economic decision-makers, we need to better understand how money and markets are increasingly both the weapon of military intervention and the anticipated outcome.
Militaries, as part of the counterinsurgency initiatives in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been makin... more Militaries, as part of the counterinsurgency initiatives in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been making payments to civilians in cases of ‘inadvertent’ injury, death, and/or property damage. There are no legal norms governing civilian compensation in war. Rather, military payments are seen as a way to help ‘win’ the hearts and minds of the population. This paper examines this turn to military payments, with a focus on US practices, and the implications for our understanding of contemporary changes to warfare. I suggest that while monetary payments can alleviate short-term economic need, the lack of legal liability is problematic as it may help amplify the impunity of warring soldiers. The paper begins with an overview of the bureaucratic ways that monetary values are attributed to death and injury. The paper then turns to consider how these payments reinforce the notion of ‘collateral damage’ that is legitimized in International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Finally, I draw upon theories of the gift, and of the gift of war, to interrogate the affective register in which military payments are made, inserted as they are in narratives of sympathy and condolence, which bind the giver and receiver in relations of indebtedness and dependence.
In September, 2007, private contractors working for Blackwater, a private military contracting fi... more In September, 2007, private contractors working for Blackwater, a private military contracting firm based in the US, killed 17 people in Nisour Square in Iraq, and severely injured more than twenty others. For over seven years, the contractors evaded legal liability. This paper examines the way that legal jurisdiction played out in this evasion of accountability. We first examine the role of Order 17 in mandating that private contractors in Iraq “be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of their sending states.” We then turn to interrogate the ways that “juridical othering,” which operates through appeals to jurisdiction, has been employed by the state to distance itself from its own actions, in that the contractors were seen to be accountable neither to martial nor to domestic civilian laws. Subsequently, we examine the impact of this juridical othering on the victims of the violence, as they too are “othered” in the law. Through this analysis we demonstrate that the processes of juridical othering are the result not only of deliberate state action, but also of complex spatio-legal jurisdictions that are historically ingrained, but are called into being in times of war in particular kinds of ways. In our conclusion, we point to the October 2014 ruling in the US federal courts that found 3 Blackwater employees guilty of manslaughter and one of murder, to show how law is continually unfolding, but as it does so, reinforces the intimate ways that law and war are co-constituted.
This paper examines how lives have been valued (or not) in the US federal compensation programs s... more This paper examines how lives have been valued (or not) in the US federal compensation programs set up in the wake of 9/11. The Victim Compensation Fund (VCF), implemented within days of the attacks, provided unlimited funds to the victims. In contrast, many first responders who developed illnesses later have had access to limited support. Only in 2011 was the Zadroga Act signed into place, which extends compensation to these workers and others. This paper compares and contrasts the two programs to make two points. One, the debates around compensation lay bare the differential values that are ascribed to life, and how biopower not only fosters life but abandons some to the point of death. Two, despite the controversies around extending compensation, the Zadroga Act was eventually enacted. Our second point is thus that war is not just destructive, but can be used to reconstitute the social and political in unanticipated ways.
Oh my body, make of me always a man who questions! (Fanon, 1967: 232) What happens to research wh... more Oh my body, make of me always a man who questions! (Fanon, 1967: 232) What happens to research when the researched become the researchers? (Smith, 2013: 183)
Things start to become militarized when their legitimacy depends on their association with milita... more Things start to become militarized when their legitimacy depends on their association with military goals. When something becomes militarized, it appears to rise in value. Militarization is seductive.
This essay points to some of the ways that militaries are focused on money and economics, and add... more This essay points to some of the ways that militaries are focused on money and economics, and addresses what this means for understanding the entanglements of security and finance. We cannot think about security in the contemporary moment without also thinking about militaries and war, and it is only by addressing how military power engages money and finance that can we better understand how insecurity is enacted.
In this article, we trace the interconnections between humanitarianism and militarism. We highlig... more In this article, we trace the interconnections between humanitarianism and militarism. We highlight the significance of a geographical perspective in emphasizing the spatial and multiscalar dimensions of this changing relationship, particularly in Western states. In doing so, we reveal the violent geographies produced through militarized humanitarianism and demonstrate the ways political violence can be obscured through invocations of humanitarianism. We look at five overlapping lines of enquiry: the way humanitarianism is used to modulate war; the rationalization of military intervention as humanitarian; military deployment in response to humanitarian crises; the military take-up of humanitarian-style practices; and weapons development and humanitarianism.
In this article, we trace the interconnections between humanitarianism and militarism. We highlig... more In this article, we trace the interconnections between humanitarianism and militarism. We highlight the significance of a geographical perspective in emphasizing the spatial and multiscalar dimensions of this changing relationship, particularly in Western states. In doing so, we reveal the violent geographies produced through militarized humanitarianism and demonstrate the ways political violence can be obscured through invocations of humanitarianism. We look at five overlapping lines of enquiry: the way humanitarianism is used to modulate war; the rationalization of military intervention as humanitarian; military deployment in response to humanitarian crises; the military take-up of humanitarian-style practices; and weapons development and humanitarianism.
This book review symposium interrogates Joel Wainwright's recent text Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Mili... more This book review symposium interrogates Joel Wainwright's recent text Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought (Palgrave Macillan 2013). Overtly, this text is a scathing critique of the Bowman Expeditions, launched in 2006 with several million dollars of funding from the Foreign Military Study Office (FMSO) of the US Army. Two years later, and well into the first expedition in Oaxaca, Mexico, several groups from Oaxaca responded, accusing the Bowman Expedition of “Geopiracy” and of tricking the indigenous communities involved. In mounting a robust critique of the Bowman Expeditions, in this text Wainwright simultaneously takes on several other pressing issues in the discipline of geography, among them the militarization of geography, power, ethics, transparency and consent in fieldwork, the supposed objectivity and value-less-ness of mapping, and the tepid response to the Bowman controversy mustered by the AAG. In this review symposium a diverse group of ...
Page 1. Emily Gilbert Beyond Survival? ... In Canada, wilderness has also played a central role i... more Page 1. Emily Gilbert Beyond Survival? ... In Canada, wilderness has also played a central role in the national imaginary, and it has been relentlessly repackaged and remarketed for domestic and foreign consumption (Mackey 2002; O'Brian and White 2007). ...
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2008
In the Space of Theory is a difficult but important read. Matt Sparke has written a theoretically... more In the Space of Theory is a difficult but important read. Matt Sparke has written a theoretically challenging and empirically rich monograph which presents an articulate and compelling case for the necessity of critical human geography within wider debates in critical theory. Through examples ranging from First Nation land-rights claims, to the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement, to the current war in Iraq, Sparke challenges the hyphen between `nation' and `state' by inserting the hidden hyphen in geography to render the term ...
What is changing? This: the contradictions and predations of patriarchal imperialist capitalism, ... more What is changing? This: the contradictions and predations of patriarchal imperialist capitalism, and of the deeply racist and gendered material and symbolic order it produces, have enabled an accelerating, unrelenting, unfettered extractive stance toward the planet, its ecosystems and natural resources, and the plant and animal species and human beings that inhabit it. That stance has not only resulted in increasingly outrageous inequalities and concentrations of wealth; it has gotten us to the brink of climate catastrophe, ecosystem collapse, and a vast, literally unimaginable intensification and expansion of human immiseration and suffering. So what is changing in security (if not in security studies, critical or otherwise) is everything -from the entire context of stable planetary ecosystems that gave rise to the way our world is politically, economically and socially structured, to our understandings of those structures, and to our models and theories of what constitutes security within them, be it state security or human security.
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2020
My revised and updated entry on Liberalism for the second edition of the International Encycloped... more My revised and updated entry on Liberalism for the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by Audrey Kobayashi.
Borders are being stretched as they are deterritorialized, reterritorialized and extra-territoria... more Borders are being stretched as they are deterritorialized, reterritorialized and extra-territorialized. But borders are not only being relocated elsewhere: just as they are extended they are also snapped back into place in order to limit the rights of travellers and migrants, and to deny the accountability of border officials. This elasticity—expansion but also contraction—is the focus of this paper, with particular attention to the Canada–US border with respect to how legal jurisdiction is being reworked territorially, and the ways that the law gets attached to particular bodies. Three contemporary case studies are examined: the Safe Third Country Agreement, the Shiprider program, and the expansion of preclearance programs. While each of these cases is quite different in that they deal with asylum seekers, cross-border policing, and extraterritorial customs programs, together they illustrate how borders are being made elastic, and with what political implications.
Little academic attention has been directed towards the victims of
terrorism. This article begins... more Little academic attention has been directed towards the victims of terrorism. This article begins to do so by interrogating how victims get compensated, and for how much, in North America and Western Europe. This article examines compensation from three vantage points. First, attention is directed to the variety of state programmes that have been mobilised over the last several decades to build individual and state resilience. I will suggest, however, that many of these programmes fall short, as they fail to meet victim needs. Indeed, as I subsequently illustrate, public and private philanthropy are playing an increasingly important role in providing victim support, sometimes superseding state contributions. Yet while they speak to an affective response that emerges out of and reinforces community building, they are also highly uneven and can entrench existing social inequalities. I then turn to examine the turn to the courts as a means both for recouping further compensation and for achieving some kind of accountability. Notably, the drive to provide victims with other mechanisms for compensation has led to new legislative mechanisms that are reshaping geopolitics by reworking the principle of sovereign immunity. Together, these examples of compensation trouble simplistic characterisations of victimhood while also illustrating how both victims and terrorism are being made governable, often with chilling consequences. They also expose the limits of the state and of state sovereignty.
Recent events have put human encounters with state sovereignty at borders under intense scrutiny ... more Recent events have put human encounters with state sovereignty at borders under intense scrutiny from governments, media, and academics alike. Over 40,000 people died attempting to cross a border from 2006 to 2015 and a record 65 million people were displaced by conflict around the world in 2015 (http:// missingmigrants.iom.int/). These 40,000 þ deaths are not the direct results of wars where humans become the casualties of stateto-state conflicts or internal strife. Rather, they are a consequence of states expanding the reach of their security and detention practices to capture, intercede, or make intentionally perilous the movements of people in search of better opportunitiesdor often just basic safety and human dignitydfor themselves and their family. There are almost 70 border walls around the world, up from 15 in 198915 in (Vallet, 2014, and these are just the most visible physical manifestations of what is much wider set of state practices to control movement such as deployments of more border guards, seaborne patrols, and investments in new technologies to monitor more comprehensively events within state space, at the edges of their territories, and beyond.
In US counterinsurgency doctrine, money has been characterized as “ammunition” and as a “weapons ... more In US counterinsurgency doctrine, money has been characterized as “ammunition” and as a “weapons system.” Money is being wielded to win over the “hearts and minds” of the population, and to protect the lives of the occupying forces. Soldiers are taking on greater responsibility for spending money on reconstruction and development projects on the battlefield. Billions of dollars have been spent by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan on a wide range of projects including building schools, developing infrastructure, agricultural assistance, as well as microfinance. But military doctrine now extends to helping implement free-market economies, supporting business creation, setting-up banking facilities and promoting entrepreneurialism. In fact, economic development has been recast as a constitutive form of combat, not simply as a supplement to conventional warfare, or as part of post-conflict reconstruction. The use of money as a “weapons system” speaks both to a different kind of military and a different kind of war. Fighting and violence have not been replaced or even displaced, but are joined with new strategies and tactics that sit uneasily side by side. As soldiers have been retooled to be economic decision-makers, we need to better understand how money and markets are increasingly both the weapon of military intervention and the anticipated outcome.
Militaries, as part of the counterinsurgency initiatives in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been makin... more Militaries, as part of the counterinsurgency initiatives in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been making payments to civilians in cases of ‘inadvertent’ injury, death, and/or property damage. There are no legal norms governing civilian compensation in war. Rather, military payments are seen as a way to help ‘win’ the hearts and minds of the population. This paper examines this turn to military payments, with a focus on US practices, and the implications for our understanding of contemporary changes to warfare. I suggest that while monetary payments can alleviate short-term economic need, the lack of legal liability is problematic as it may help amplify the impunity of warring soldiers. The paper begins with an overview of the bureaucratic ways that monetary values are attributed to death and injury. The paper then turns to consider how these payments reinforce the notion of ‘collateral damage’ that is legitimized in International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Finally, I draw upon theories of the gift, and of the gift of war, to interrogate the affective register in which military payments are made, inserted as they are in narratives of sympathy and condolence, which bind the giver and receiver in relations of indebtedness and dependence.
In September, 2007, private contractors working for Blackwater, a private military contracting fi... more In September, 2007, private contractors working for Blackwater, a private military contracting firm based in the US, killed 17 people in Nisour Square in Iraq, and severely injured more than twenty others. For over seven years, the contractors evaded legal liability. This paper examines the way that legal jurisdiction played out in this evasion of accountability. We first examine the role of Order 17 in mandating that private contractors in Iraq “be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of their sending states.” We then turn to interrogate the ways that “juridical othering,” which operates through appeals to jurisdiction, has been employed by the state to distance itself from its own actions, in that the contractors were seen to be accountable neither to martial nor to domestic civilian laws. Subsequently, we examine the impact of this juridical othering on the victims of the violence, as they too are “othered” in the law. Through this analysis we demonstrate that the processes of juridical othering are the result not only of deliberate state action, but also of complex spatio-legal jurisdictions that are historically ingrained, but are called into being in times of war in particular kinds of ways. In our conclusion, we point to the October 2014 ruling in the US federal courts that found 3 Blackwater employees guilty of manslaughter and one of murder, to show how law is continually unfolding, but as it does so, reinforces the intimate ways that law and war are co-constituted.
This paper examines how lives have been valued (or not) in the US federal compensation programs s... more This paper examines how lives have been valued (or not) in the US federal compensation programs set up in the wake of 9/11. The Victim Compensation Fund (VCF), implemented within days of the attacks, provided unlimited funds to the victims. In contrast, many first responders who developed illnesses later have had access to limited support. Only in 2011 was the Zadroga Act signed into place, which extends compensation to these workers and others. This paper compares and contrasts the two programs to make two points. One, the debates around compensation lay bare the differential values that are ascribed to life, and how biopower not only fosters life but abandons some to the point of death. Two, despite the controversies around extending compensation, the Zadroga Act was eventually enacted. Our second point is thus that war is not just destructive, but can be used to reconstitute the social and political in unanticipated ways.
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Papers by Emily Gilbert
terrorism. This article begins to do so by interrogating how victims
get compensated, and for how much, in North America and
Western Europe. This article examines compensation from three
vantage points. First, attention is directed to the variety of state
programmes that have been mobilised over the last several decades
to build individual and state resilience. I will suggest, however,
that many of these programmes fall short, as they fail to
meet victim needs. Indeed, as I subsequently illustrate, public and
private philanthropy are playing an increasingly important role in
providing victim support, sometimes superseding state contributions.
Yet while they speak to an affective response that emerges
out of and reinforces community building, they are also highly
uneven and can entrench existing social inequalities. I then turn to
examine the turn to the courts as a means both for recouping
further compensation and for achieving some kind of accountability.
Notably, the drive to provide victims with other mechanisms
for compensation has led to new legislative mechanisms that are
reshaping geopolitics by reworking the principle of sovereign
immunity. Together, these examples of compensation trouble
simplistic characterisations of victimhood while also illustrating
how both victims and terrorism are being made governable,
often with chilling consequences. They also expose the limits of
the state and of state sovereignty.
terrorism. This article begins to do so by interrogating how victims
get compensated, and for how much, in North America and
Western Europe. This article examines compensation from three
vantage points. First, attention is directed to the variety of state
programmes that have been mobilised over the last several decades
to build individual and state resilience. I will suggest, however,
that many of these programmes fall short, as they fail to
meet victim needs. Indeed, as I subsequently illustrate, public and
private philanthropy are playing an increasingly important role in
providing victim support, sometimes superseding state contributions.
Yet while they speak to an affective response that emerges
out of and reinforces community building, they are also highly
uneven and can entrench existing social inequalities. I then turn to
examine the turn to the courts as a means both for recouping
further compensation and for achieving some kind of accountability.
Notably, the drive to provide victims with other mechanisms
for compensation has led to new legislative mechanisms that are
reshaping geopolitics by reworking the principle of sovereign
immunity. Together, these examples of compensation trouble
simplistic characterisations of victimhood while also illustrating
how both victims and terrorism are being made governable,
often with chilling consequences. They also expose the limits of
the state and of state sovereignty.