primarily political practices, it is frequently
Military geography
Rachel Woodward
Newcastle University, UK
Definitions of military geography
Military geography is the study of the ways in
which militarism and military activities are geo-
graphically constituted and expressed. Central to
this definition is the idea that military practices,
both material and conceptual, not only have
observable effects on space and on places, envi-
ronments, and landscapes, but also that militarism
and military activities themselves are brought
into being through the inherent spatiality of
social relations. Also significant to the definition
is the idea that military geographies emerge
both through the material practices of military
institutions, organizations, and associated social
groups, and through the conceptual and dis-
cursive processes of militarism. Militarism is the
prioritization of military force in the resolution
of conflict, and analysts talk also of militarization,
a broad set of social, cultural, economic, and
political processes by which military approaches
to social problems and issues gain both elite
and popular acceptance (Woodward 2004;
2005). Armed conflict itself, and all the indirect,
non-conflict activities that armed forces under-
take to prepare for the deployment of military
power, are of equal interest to military geography.
Military geography, then, is a subfield of human
geography, which takes as its central focus the
spatialities of military practices. Because mili-
tary geography engages with the outcome of
The International Encyclopedia of Geography.
Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0280
understood as complementary to political geog-
raphy, and shares with political geography many
of that subdiscipline’s epistemological concerns
with poststructuralist theoretical approaches and
heterogeneous methodologies. It is notable,
however, that many of the topics studied within
military geography draw explicitly on broader
economic, social, and landscape geography
traditions and approaches to make sense of the
spatialities of militarism and military activities.
Also, and reflecting the wide-ranging impacts of
military practices, materialities, and discourses,
military geography looks across the social sci-
ence disciplines (sociology, political science,
international relations, feminist studies, and
social psychology in particular), the humanities
(particularly historical, cultural, archaeological,
and landscape studies), and the environmental
sciences, meaning that the subfield is defined less
by disciplinary parameters and more by its mul-
tidisciplinary perspectives on a core set of issues
relating to military forces and all this entails.
Military geography has existed as a term defin-
ing a field of study for as long as the discipline
of geography itself has existed, with a formaliza-
tion of its scope and approach emergent in the
mid-nineteenth century as a consequence of the
colonial and imperial ambitions of nation-states,
particularly the United Kingdom and the United
States. A definition established at that time and
still in circulation within some academic groups
defines military geography as the application of
geographical tools and techniques to the solution
of military problems (Galgano and Palka 2011).
Although this – very applied – understanding
of military geography still has some purchase,
the majority of writers within contemporary
M I L I TARY GE O GR A P H Y
Anglophone geography would seek to distance
themselves from the notion of military geograph-
ical scholarship as contributing to the military
aims and objectives of states and armed forces
and their efficiency, working instead with a more
critical approach, which sees military issues as
the outcome of social life and political contes-
tation, rather than just accepting “military” as a
functional and given category, and emphasizes
militarism and militarization as simultaneously
discursive, ideological, and material. With this
critical turn, military geography has paralleled
developments within military sociology and
international relations, which are in their own
ways working toward a more political, less
functional, military scholarship.
Dimensions of military geography
The scope and dimensions of military geography
have always been responsive to developments in
military organization, strategy, and technology,
and to shifts in the political relationships between
military institutions and civil society. Military
geography therefore has a dynamism reflecting
this responsiveness, but fewer well-established
traditions among its approaches. There are, how-
ever, four key dimensions to military geography
through which most research has been focused:
summarized as spatiality, place, environment,
and landscape.
Spatiality
Spatiality, both as a capacity of social (and thus
military) relations, and as an empirically observ-
able feature or outcome of social activity, is
the first key dimension in military geography.
At its most basic and conceptually straightfor-
ward, and reflecting a long tradition of interest
in battlefield strategy, military geography is
2
interested in the operation of military activ-
ities across space – the “terrain and tactics”
approach that seeks to understand how spe-
cific military campaigns or incidents have been
shaped by environmental factors including local
geomorphology, topography, climate, specific
weather events, or biogeography, which in turn
may or may not have proven significance for
the outcome of that particular campaign or
event. More nuanced and conceptually sophis-
ticated approaches to the study of the practical
deployment of military force have in recent
years explored the battlespace in its entirety
(so including the aerial and maritime as well
as land-based dimensions), looking at how the
geographical imaginations implicit in military
planning and strategizing become played out
across space and demand particular visualization
and mapping practices (Williams 2011). The
spatialities of interest to military geographers
also include global, regional, national, and local
power plays over territories, borders, and bound-
aries, and the ways in which military power and
action shapes territorial blocks. Also significant
here are changing modes of warfare, including
developments in the technologies of armed
conflict and deployment of lethal force, the ways
in which these have transformed the nature of
armed conflict in the twenty-first century, and
the ways in which state and non-state actors can
pursue armed violence. The pursuit of armed
violence includes obvious kinetic activities, but
also less visible practices around visualizing,
mapping, and conceptualizing the battlespace in
order to exert military control over space in ways
other than direct physical presence or violent
destruction of people and place. Increasingly,
military geography’s interest in space is expressed
less as empirically orientated descriptions of
actual deployments of military power, and more
as explorations of how space is conceptualized
by military planners and strategies, and what

these theoretical understandings might in turn
mean for the uses (and abuses) of military force
in the present and future.
Place
Military geography has a range of interests in
questions of place, a second key dimension to the
topic. Reflecting a broader human geographical
interest in the specificity of places as nodes
within networks of social relations, work on
place has tended to take specific types of military
places as case studies for the exploration of wider
social relations. So, for example, research on the
economic geographies of the defense industry
and defense economy has tied the growth of
national and increasingly multinational defense
industrial capacities to both the changing for-
tunes of (inter)national manufacturing industry
and associated research and development func-
tions, and to the use of the defense industrial base
as a tool of both economic and military power
projection. Defense economies are also evident
in the economic relationships between military
installations (i.e., bases and barracks) and their
surrounding localities, and a key area of interest
here has been the extent to which military bases
do, or do not, support wider economic activities
in the localities and regions in which they are
based. Military bases also raise a host of issues
concerning the social relations they shape and
reproduce, and military geographers, along with
sociologists and anthropologists, have sought to
trace out the complexities and consequences of
civil−military relationships in localities where
a military base is present. The place-making
practices of military power are also evident in
the reproduction of urban and infrastructural
forms and built environments around the globe
as a consequence of the extension and consol-
idation of military power particularly (but not
exclusively) by the US armed forces (Gillem
MIL ITARY GEOGR A PHY
2007). Geographers have also focused on the
ways places come to be imagined, and the
specific ways in which military power, control,
and objectives can be seen to provide particular
readings of places at scales from the specific to
the regional as part of mechanisms to legitimate
a military presence (Farish 2010).
Environment
The effects of military activities on environ-
ments, and the ways in which discourses of
environmentalism become articulated for spe-
cific purposes and ends, constitute a third key
dimension of military geography. Military activ-
ities have profound environmental impacts,
ranging from the modification of local ecolo-
gies and geomorphological features through to
contamination and pollution. The environmen-
tal effects of military activities are associated
primarily with instances of armed conflict; the
physical destruction brought by the deployment
of artillery, practices of aerial bombardment, or
processes of infantry maneuver can be readily
imagined, and accounting for environmental
impacts in both the immediate aftermath of
war, and over much longer-term time periods,
remains a significant element of military geo-
graphical study. In addition, military geography
has also been attentive to the more mundane and
prosaic impacts of non-conflict military activities
through, for example, the pollution effects of
military basing or the environmental protections
inadvertently brought to some environments
by the blocking effects of military presence.
The apparent paradox, that military sites can
be simultaneously sites of military presence and
of high environmental value, has prompted a
wealth of studies that have looked to tease out
both the validity of the claims made by military
organizations about the benign effects of military
practices, and the politics of such claims (Havlick
3
M I L I TARY GE O GR A P H Y
2007). In parallel with the approaches of envi-
ronmental historians, military geography seeks
to explore also the role of representations of
environments and their specificity in arguments
about national identities and the pursuit of armed
conflict in assertion or defense of those identities.
Landscape
The fourth key dimension of military geography
is the focus on landscapes. Military landscapes
can be conceptualized in a great variety of ways
(Woodward 2014) but underpinning this range is
a focus on the distinctive ways in which military
and nonmilitary/civilian actors view, interpret,
and represent landscapes, the political functions
of these diverse interpretations, and the insights
that a specifically landscape-focused approach
can bring to understanding the operation of mil-
itary power. Studies of military understandings
of landscape include the specific ways in which
ground is read for military purposes, at scales
ranging from the efforts of small infantry patrols
to assess territory for tactical purposes through
to the mechanisms by which swathes of territory
are interpreted for broader strategic purposes. As
with assessments of military environmentalism,
military landscape studies have been heavily
influenced by concepts of representation, in
turn reflecting dominant approaches in cultural
geography since the 1990s. The focus on rep-
resentation has generated a wealth of studies of,
in particular, sites of memorialization, as geog-
raphers attempt to engage with the meanings
and understandings of armed conflict conveyed
through, for example, battlefield sites, sites of
mourning and remembrance such as war memo-
rials, and sites of wartime atrocity. Studies of mil-
itary landscapes, again reflecting developments
more widely in cultural geography, are increas-
ingly attentive to ways of being in landscape,
4
including awareness of and interest in the per-
ceptual, haptic, sensory, embodied, and affectual
effects of military landscapes. With the attention
to the phenomenologies of encounter comes
also an awareness of the politics of being in such
place; military landscapes are not neutral spaces,
and there are practical and methodological issues
these sites raise for the geographer which shape
the possibilities for their exploration.
Military geography in relation to human
geography
In addition to its focus on the range of topics
within these dimensions, military geography is
also increasingly concerned with contributing
to two significant developments within human
geography. The first of these concerns the ways
in which concepts of militarism and militariza-
tion are defined and used. Although definitions
of these terms are given at the start of this entry,
it would be misleading to suggest that they are
fixed or that they have shared currency across and
beyond geography. That these terminologies and
associated conceptualizations are used in often
markedly different ways by different writers is
indicative, first, of the novelty within the social
sciences of taking militarism and militarization
seriously as objects of study. Reflecting human
geography’s seeming disinterest in military issues
in the postwar period, these terms and their
conceptual uses have only relatively recently
been subject to critical interrogation. Indeed,
arguments have been made for their increasing
obsolescence in a world where specifically mili-
tary concerns and issues might be seen as part of,
or on a continuum with, a broader range of issues
pertaining to security and securitization. Con-
versely, the specificity of military organizations
as agents of states, of military violence as planned
and executed by state-legitimized actors who sit

in a relationship with civil society by virtue of
that state sanction, and of military capabilities
reflecting investments by the state, indicates that
geography may need to engage with questions
of military specificity – as well as related but
distinct issues around security – for a while yet.
The second development in human geog-
raphy has been the extension of specifically
military-related studies across political (and to
a lesser extent social) geography; the study of
military geographies, in other words, is not the
sole preserve of those self-identifying as military
geographers. This extension of the study of
military phenomena reflects the fact that in the
first decade and more of the twenty-first century
the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
ongoing military violence in Israel and Palestine,
and the long-running armed conflicts in central
Africa, have made armed conflict inescapably real
as a feature of daily life for geographers working
in a variety of national contexts. Accordingly,
political geography, and in particular critical
geopolitics, has become much more alert to
issues of militarism and militarization as part of
the latter’s attempts to grapple with the spatiali-
ties of violence (Dalby 2010). This development
in turn has prompted explorations of popular
cultural engagements with the materialities and
discourses through which armed violence is
understood; the rich emergent literature on
military-themed video gaming is a case in point.
In turn, geography has been significant for
military studies more generally, particularly for
critical military studies, which seek to question
not only causes, consequences, and effects of
armed conflict and military capabilities, but
also the ways in which military processes and
practices can be seen as the outcome of social life
and political contestation, rather than just view-
ing “military” as a given functional category.
In exploring the spatial constitution of military
power, the multiple ways in which this works at a
MIL ITARY GEOGR A PHY
range of scales (including, significantly, the indi-
vidual and embodied), and the intersections of
different scalar effects, geographical approaches
to military topics (whether branded as military
geography, critical geopolitics, or something else
entirely) have a significant contribution to make
to a cross-disciplinary critique of the uses and
abuses of military power. And while to date the
engagements between those advocating serious
study of military topics and those arguing for a
focus on a geography centered on nonviolence
and an ethics of peace have been limited, it is
important to note that in its contemporary crit-
ical incarnation, military geography should not
be assumed to be antipathetic to antimilitarism.
Future research directions for military
geography
Of the many future directions and issues for
military geographical study, three stand out
for particular scrutiny. The first of these is
methodological. Military phenomena continue
to be studied, as they have long been, drawing
the full range of methodologies and research
techniques used across the social sciences
(Williams et al. 2016). These include quantitative
data collection and analysis, the usual variety of
interactional methods including interviews of
various types, focus groups, and ethnographic
studies, textual analysis of documentation, visual
methodologies, and field-based practices of
walking and observation. Military research,
however, raises questions about accessibility in
ways that have quite pronounced effects on
what can, and cannot, be studied, because of
the nature of military institutions themselves.
Although not always closed, secretive, or hostile
to social scientific researchers, they frequently
are. This hostility in turn has an effect on what
5
M I L I TARY GE O GR A P H Y
can be studied and how. Methodological inno-
vation as means of countering access problems
is a hallmark of military geography – and much
critical military research is not sponsored or
endorsed by military gatekeepers. That said, the
relative obscuring of military geographical stud-
ies within human geography is at least partially
explained by the difficulties of doing military
research, and this remains an issue for those
concerned to explore the nature and effects of
military power.
The second key area for future research lies
with the political economies of military institu-
tions and military power which arise from the
movement toward the privatization of military
functions and the consequences of the retraction
of the state from the direct execution of military
activities. The knock-on effects of neoliberal
economic policies in many advanced capitalist
nation-states since the 1980s have played out
in distinct ways with regards to military issues.
While geography is starting to become alert to
the most visible of these effects, in, for example,
the exponential increase in the number of
private security contractors deployed by NATO
governments and other agencies as part of force
deployments, the less obvious, sometimes mun-
dane, but equally profound effects, such as the
transfer of personnel accommodation, facility
management, specialist equipment training, and
recruitment services to the private sector, are all
in the process of prompting new spatialities of
economic and social relations at scales from the
individual to the global, and with effects from
the battlespace to the home base.
A third area for future research is the con-
tribution that military geography can make to
understanding civil–military relations. There is
considerable potential for a more spatially alert
conceptualization of the relationships between
military institutions and organizations and the
civil societies in which they are located. Over
the past decade, more critical approaches in
6
military studies have looked to reconceptualize
civil–military relations less as a managerial issue
where the purpose of theoretical critique is
the greater efficiency or management of armed
forces as a tool of democratic states, and more as
a discursive relationship where the categories of
“military” and “civilian” are in constant states of
imagination and rearticulation. The role of scale
and of spatial relationships in the process through
which the categories consistently define them-
selves against each other is a pressing political as
well as geographical question.
SEE ALSO: Critical geography; Geopolitics;
Political geography; Postconflict geographies;
Security; Violence; War
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