Browse

Holidays in the Danger Zone traces the usually overlooked connections between warfare and tourism. It shows how a tourist sensibility shapes the behaviour of soldiers in war – especially the experiences of Western military populations deployed in ‘exotic’ settings. This tourist sensibility certainly includes the familiar military rotations of ‘Rest and Relaxation’ (R&R), but also more mundane episodes when soldiers transition from the battlefield into landscapes of leisure and tourism. The book also explores how a military sensibility shapes the development of tourism in post-war contexts, from the immediate instances of ‘Dark Tourism’ to the more established displays of conflict in museums, galleries and memorial sites. By focusing on the practices of soldiers as they become tourists and the experiences of tourists as they engage in representations of conflict, Holidays in the Danger Zone exposes the mundane and everyday entanglements between these two seemingly opposed worlds. It is primarily concerned with the extent to which war and tourism reinforce prevailing modes of domination within historically constituted global orders. To that end, it critically examines the war-tourism nexus as it developed through 19th Century Imperialism, the ‘total wars’ of WWI and WWII, the Cold War stalemate, Globalization in the 1990s and the recent War on Terror.

This book explores the rise of the Predator Empire, the name for the contemporary “dronified” U.S. national security state. Moving from the Vietnam War to the “war on terror,” it investigates how changes in military strategy, domestic policing, and state surveillance have come together to enclose the planet in a robotic system of control. It argues that we are witnessing a transition from a labor-intensive “American empire” to a machine-intensive Predator Empire. Following philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Peter Sloterdijk, the book argues that the nonhuman environment directly influences who we are, and therefore goes beyond considering drone warfare as a purely military concern. The rise of drones present a series of “existential crises” that are reengineering the spaces of violence, domestic policing, and even the character of modern states.