Thoughts on military mobilities, trade and capital accumulation, struggles over labour and citizenship rights in the making of transport infrastructures.
As I wrote earlier, one of the most amazing sections of Deb Cowen’s amazing book is about how after its closure, Camp Bucca was transformed into Basra Logistics City. Today, yet another article has come out about how Camp Bucca was the incubator for ISIS/Da’ish: Baghdadi also seemed to have a way with his captors. […]
I am reading Bill Cronon’s extraordinary Nature’s Metropolis. For obvious reasons, the chapters on credit, on canals and water transport, and on the railways are most interesting to me. This, however, came as a surprise: Before the invention of standard time, clocks were set according to the rules of astronomy: noon was the moment when the sun stood […]
Christian Science Monitor reports that the British are building watchtowers along the Lebanese-Syrian border: “A lonely fortified watchtower built from stacked metal shipping containers, topped by a bullet-proofed observation booth, and protected from shrapnel and assaults by 18-foot-high walls of rock-filled Hesco barricades, marks the western edge of the regional campaign to check the expansion […]
Just check out this incredibly fabulous painting of Hayreddin Barbarossa and Sinan Reis, 16th century pirates extraordinaire… (thanks Orit).
‘[Golden Dawn] created battalions against their political opponents, and then they rented them out, to whoever wanted to rent them,” he told Channel 4 News. In one of the most important cases, a network of businessmen active in the shipping industry allegedly involved Golden Dawn in their continuing struggle against the stubborn unions which wouldn’t accept […]
Last week, huge protests took place in Brussels, with the trade unions reporting some 130,000-150,000 people showing up; and major clashes with the police. The protests in fact have been going on for some time now. And in the April protests, “hundreds of marchers adorned in the orange bibs of the BTB-ABVV docker’s union from Antwerp […]
The British Library Map Collection includes this amazing map: They explain the controversy around this map: … in the 1970s in Britain, suffering from the Middle East oil embargo, with economic malaise and high unemployment, it was argued as such. There is a deep blue area on the map which curved around Norway on the map, […]
One of the most trenchant points that Deb Cowen makes in her superb book, The Deadly Life of Logistics, is that labour mobilisation is a form of “obstruction” that is securitised by shipping companies and states and crushed, precisely because it becomes a kind of chokepoint for the circulation of goods. And if the goods cannot […]
I have already written about ships as workplaces, and of workers held captive on ships. Now, the NY Times reports on a massive floating refinery which is going to look for fossil fuels in the Indian Ocean. The ship is HUGE: More than 530 yards long and 80 yards wide, it was constructed with 260,000 […]
My review of Deb Cowen’s wonderful new book, The Deadly Life of Logistics, is now out. I write The Deadly Life of Logisticsis organised around a series of themes whose interconnections are clear throughout: the integral conjuncture between the discourses of management studies and of logistics; the securitisation of labour; and perhaps most important, the illusory […]
