Shaping the Borderlands: the spatial and temporal reconfigurations of modern warfare

The Western state-led turn to remote forms of military intervention as recently deployed in the Middle East and across Africa, is often explained as resulting from risk-aversion (avoidance of ground combat), materiality (‘the force of matter’), or the adoption of a networked operational logic by major military powers, mimicking the ‘hit-and-run’ tactics of their enemies. Although recognizing the mobilizing capacities of these phenomena, we argue that the new military interventionism is prompted by a more fundamental transformation, grounded in the spatial and temporal reconfiguration of war. Paying tribute to Zygmunt Bauman’s liquidity vocabulary (2000, 2001) and Derek Gregory’s notion of ‘everywhere war’ (2011) we use the term liquid warfare in highlighting how conventional ties between war, space and time have become undone. Liquid warfare is about flexible, open-ended, ‘pop-up’ military interventions, supported by remote technology and reliant on local partnerships and private contractors, through which (coalitions of) parties aim to promote and protect interests. It shuns direct control of territory and populations and its cumbersome order-building and order-maintaining responsibilities, focusing instead on ‘shaping’ the international security environment through ‘forward posture’ and ‘presence’. Liquid warfare is thus temporally open-ended and event-ful, as well as spatially dispersed and mobile (Demmers & Gould 2018).