Thoughts on military mobilities, trade and capital accumulation, struggles over labour and citizenship rights in the making of transport infrastructures.
15 August 11.35 ship-time (GMT + 3). Steaming slowly towards Mersin I suddenly have access to data and have spent the morning catching up with my emails. It has been a quiet morning as we have been adrift at anchorage waiting to be told to go towards the pilot station, which we were just […]
14 August 2016 08.30 ship time (GMT+3) At Beirut port The city is under a grey haze and standing on deck outside one is assaulted by the smell of the Burj Hammoud garbage mountain just to the east of the port, which Joanne Nucho has written about. Apparently, we can’t go onshore, or even […]
13 August 06.00 ship time (GMT+2); 07.00 GPS time (my phone) Steaming towards Beirut The ship left Damietta sometime after midnight, having spent only twelve hours there. The officers must be absolutely shattered, since we will be arriving in Beirut this evening sometime. The area between here and Beirut is apparently full of warships without […]
Friday 12 August 12.15 (GMT +2) Arriving in Damietta You can tell you are approaching port by a number of signs. First is the arrival of the land creatures: swifts, green flies, storks (or something else long-necked and ungainly). Next, you see the number of fishing boats –without an AIS and cutting through the wake […]
11 August 2016 10.35 (Ship time. My phone’s GPS says it is actually 11.35) The Mediterranean; steaming towards Damietta The Mediterranean is such a lonely sea. Its vastness is such that one doesn’t really see ships passing except in the far distance and the AIS screen shows ships so far that they do not appear […]
In August 2016, I once again boarded a ship in Malta to travel to Jabal Ali. I had recorded the previous occasion with giddy excitement, all things seeming new and unfamiliar. Perhaps the familiarity of the trip, or the fact that I was writing my book proposals (rather than focusing on my diary entries and […]
In 1925, Walter Benjamin travelled on a freighter from Hamburg to ports in the Mediterranean. In their Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings recount the trip (pp. 240-241): “On August 19 the ship [a freighter] sailed from Hamburg, with Benjamin in unusually high spirits. Although he was worried about the possible […]
It was a great pleasure to have an occasion to think through how my previous work on counterinsurgencies connects to my current work on logistics. The occasion was an invitation to lecture at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. The abstract is as follows: It is a banal cliche of military thinking that the deployment […]
I was invited to give a lecture on my current research at the wonderful Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut. The abstract for the talk: In this talk, I will be thinking through the overlapping role of the US and UK militaries and US and UK petroleum companies in the […]
I had the good fortune of having an amazing conversation with a couple of extraordinary scholars and friends about logistics and having the conversation recorded in a podcast. Charmaine Chua (University of Minnesota) is an extraordinary young scholar working on logistical lifeworlds especially around Singapore. She has a series of wonderful writings at Disorder of Things […]
