Telluric geographies of the means of violence. On alterity, weapons, and space at the margins

This article provides a critical reading of the literatures on spaces at the margins of different polities and state/non-state forms of authority in political geography asking how infrastructures of violence are governed. In this ambit, weapons and military means have been poorly defined and conceptualised, while the ways they are actually governed (beyond a mostly instrumentalist perspective), as well as the effects this govern-mentality activity generates for the reproduction of (dis)orders at the margins, have not been directly investigated. Drawing from studies on biopolitical governmentality, and Roberto Esposito’s conceptualization of the immunitary apparatus in particular, we explore how relations of alterity, as well as attendant political spaces, are terraformed through violence and infrastructures of governing weapons and military means. Our approach is attentive to the role of materiality and non-human elements in shaping socio-spatial relations but it highlights also how there exists a close link between (1) weapons and armed humans, (2) space, and (3) identity/alterity which is articulated via the act of governing infrastructures of violence. Building upon empirical insights from Myanmar’s borderlands and frontiers, the paper shows that weapons and war-making are governed through infrastructures made of technical objects codifying violence materially, techniques of managing human-non-human entanglements, and rationalities. Conducting the conduct of violence contributes to reproduce the political space at the margins and to construct identity/alterity categories founded on the identification of less-than-human forms of life.