The Longest Journey
The Field Ambulances from the Royal Army Medical Corps were put to work in the war-ravaged landscapes of the Aisne, the Somme, Arras and Ypres; the broken bodies in their charge (above) were...
View Article‘Is this thy body’s end?’
There are all sorts of ways in which the war on Syria has been a throwback to the First World War – and all sorts of differences too – but today brought news of yet another (and, unusually, a welcome …...
View ArticleThe Leaden Hours
Ever since I attended a conference at Nijmegen on Transmobilities I’ve followed the current interest in ‘mobilities’, though from a distance and perhaps in strange ways: but I think that the following...
View ArticleTowards dissipating the fog of war
Following on from my previous post – and my work on the gas attacks on Douma in April 2018 (see here) – I’ve been reading a detailed analysis by James Harkin over at the Intercept, ‘What Happened in...
View ArticleThe Fight for Yemen
The latest issue of the wonderful Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP)’s Middle East Report on ‘The Fight for Yemen‘ is now available online: The ongoing war in Yemen that began in 2015...
View ArticlePaper trails
For an update and succinct review of attacks on hospitals and medical facilities in Syria – see also my ‘Your turn, doctor’ here – I recommend the latest fact-sheet from Physicians for Human Rights:...
View ArticleMore-than-human casualties
Apologies for the long silence – I’ve made several trips to the UK to deliver lectures, but I’ve also been (almost literally) in the trenches. My supposed-to-be 8,000 word essay on ‘Woundscapes of the...
View ArticleDirty wars and dispersed geographies of aerial violence
Several years ago we were in Dubrovnik and visited War Photo‘s mesmerising exhibition space in the old town; part of it was devoted to a permanent exhibition documenting the wars in the former...
View ArticleBeing Wounded
I’ve been working on my essay on ‘Woundscapes of the Western Front, 1914-1918’. What follows is the section dealing with the act of being wounded, drawn from a series of diaries, letters and memoirs;...
View ArticleUnderground medicine
In my work on attacks on hospitals in Syria I’ve drawn attention to the remarkable Central Cave Hospital (see also here and here) – and to what it says about a war when hospitals have to be excavated...
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The exception to the exception
There is a stunning report (including an extended video) in today’s New York Times providing detailed evidence of Russian jets systematically attacking four hospitals in Syria in just twelve hours on...
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Bombing Britain
Ages ago, as part of my research on bombing, I drew attention to Bomb Sight a remarkable digital mapping project that provided a detailed spatial inventory of the Blitz in London in 1940-41. At long...
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For Sama
For Sama – see my posts here and here – is now available on YouTube: Sama is the daughter of the film-maker Waad al-Kateab and her husband Hamza, a hospital doctor and one of 32 who remained in East...
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Under Afghan Skies: prologue
In what seems like another lifetime, although it was only last month, I spoke at a wonderful conference on “The Aesthetics of Drone Warfare“, organised by Beryl Pong and her team at the University of...
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Under Afghan Skies (1)
As promised in my previous post, here is the first installment of my essay on an airstrike on three vehicles in Uruzgan, Afghanistan on 21 February 2010; the incident was widely reported – see the...
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Bringing the war home (with apologies to Martha Rosler)
We know how often the vocabulary of medicine has been hi-jacked to describe military violence (‘surgical strikes’ and the rest) – if you are unfamiliar with the trope, I recommend Colleen Bell’s two...
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Under Afghan Skies (3)
Here is the third installment of my essay on an airstrike on three vehicles in Uruzgan, Afghanistan on 21 February 2010 that has become one of the central examples in critical discussions of remote...
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Covid-19 and armed conflict
The next installment of ‘Under Afghan Skies‘ will appear this week, but I’ve also been trying to pull together what information and insight there is on the impact of the pandemic on Syria (more on that...
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Health and the body politic
This fall Middle East Report – described by Rashid Khalidi as ‘the best periodical (in English) on the Middle East—bar none’ – from the truly outstanding Middle East Research and Information Project...
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