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 […]
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 […]
The Financial Times has been doing some fascinating investigative reporting on ISIS finances a great deal of which of course is of interest to me because of the ways in which it ties into the movement of commodities and products across territories. But what I want to write about here briefly is this wondrous map: Of […]
Ships fly a flag of convenience in order to avoid the regulatory arms of the state or transnational institutions. But here is a fascinating colonial precedent to the flag of convenience – from 1674: Thus, when the [East India Company] committees insisted in 1674 that a new Admiralty regulation, which required all English commercial shipping to […]
This wonderful piece by Keith David Watenpaugh reflects on why fishermen rescue migrants at costs to their livelihood: This last July, as the Mediterranean refugees were still being largely ignored by the EU,PBS Newshour’s Lisa Desai interviewed Captain Slaheddin of a Tunisian fishing boat that sails from the port town of Zarzis. As the captain […]
Here is an account of an interesting obsession with containers… I wonder what Allan Sekula would have made of this love of the technological sublime: http://www.ediblegeography.com/container-spotting/ There are still many unanswered mysteries that the duo hopes to get to the bottom of in their research. Where are containers born? (Cannon pointed me to this video of a […]
And here is my inaugural address on the Sinews of War and Trade (it might look like it is Gilbert Achcar, but it is actually my video!):
