Tourists or Vagabonds? Space and time in the war on terror.

It is commonly argued that time is the defining element in modern warfare. Whether one looks to military strategy, or to critical academia, the analysis is often the same: time and speed, not mass and space, are the essentials of warfare. In the 'Global War on Terror' this is the case for both the Western high-tech militaries and their asymmetrical terrorist opponents. This article attempts to qualify the current relation between time and space in war. By heuristically applying Zygmunt Baumann's concepts of the tourist and the vagabond, this article claims that, although new technologies of time have changed the relationship between space and time, space has not lost its importance. Paradoxically, by employing new temporal means, the making of space becomes the central issue in current globalized warfare. KEYWORDS: warfare, time and space, terror, globalization, military transformation

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In 1904, the British geographer Harold J. Mackinder argued before the Royal Geographical Society that the world had become one political system in which "every explosion of social forces...will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe." (1) New means of communication and transportation had shrunk the world, creating a new relationship between space and time with immense consequences for both politics and warfare. What Mackinder was arguing about was, in fact, globalization. Currently, continued changes in the relationship between time and space are of equal importance, as the United States is engaged in what has recently changed from "The Global War on Terror" to "The Long War."

This article investigates the current relationship between time and space as it unfolds in the long war between the United States and global terror. The current orthodoxy in US military thought, as well as in critical academia, is that time has conquered space. This suggests that space has lost its importance and meaning. For instance, Zygmunt Bauman claimed that September 11 was "a symbolic end to the era of space." (2) Although there have been changes to the meaning of space, I argue that we are not encountering the end of the era of space. Its meaning, and its relationship with time, are changing; however, it has not been left symbolically in the past. In fact, I argue that the predominance of time changes the function and increases the significance of space in current warfare.

Conceptions of space and ti...

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