ISRF Early Career Fellow 2019-20
ISRF Early Career Fellow 2019-20
Craig Jones is a Lecturer in Political Geography at Newcastle University. Craig completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia, where he researched the involvement of military lawyers in aerial targeting operations and the ‘legalisation’ of later modern war. He is currently working on two interdisciplinary projects, Wounds Without Borders and The War Lawyers.
Supported by an ISRF Early Career Fellowship, Wounds Without Borders investigates what happens to injured patients and healthcare infrastructures under conditions of war. The project aims to investigate and map the journeys of injured civilians from spaces of injury in Syria and Iraq to spaces of care in Turkey and Lebanon. The study will later be expanded to consider wounded populations in Gaza and infrastructures of care in Gaza, the West Bank and Jordan. War wounds are used as an analytic (Dewachi, 2015) to explore the ‘slow violence’ of war as well as its transnational biopolitical regimes of care. The project attempts to forges a new social-science approach to war that focuses on injured bodies and wounded journeys and fosters interdisciplinary thinking about war as a producer of mass-scale disability.
The War Lawyers examines the involvement of military lawyers in aerial targeting operations carried out by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Israeli military in Gaza and the West Bank. Craig’s first monograph, The War Lawyers: US, Israel and the Spaces of Targeting will be published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Drawing on several years of fieldwork and extensive interviews with military lawyers, Craig argues that international law has become part of the very fabric of later modern war and that US and Israeli military lawyers play a surprisingly crucial role in planning and executing a wide range of lethal and non-lethal military violence. This research was supported by a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship.
You can follow Craig’s work at www.thewarspace.com and @thewarspace
Wounds Without Borders offers a pioneering investigation of what happens to injured patients and healthcare infrastructures under conditions of war. The aim of the project is to investigate and map the journeys of injured civilians from spaces of injury in Syria and Iraq to spaces of care in Lebanon and Turkey. I treat war wounds as an analytic to explore the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) of war as well as its transnational biopolitical regimes of care. The project forges a new social-science approach to war that focuses on injured bodies and wounded journeys and fosters interdisciplinary thinking about war as a producer of mass-scale disability.
In recent years infrastructures of care in Lebanon and Turkey have become a lifeline for over 5.5 million refugees fleeing violence in Syria and Iraq. However, these caring spaces are largely undocumented and little understood. This project therefore responds to an urgent gap in our understanding of the scope and effectiveness of the regional healthcare response to war and displacement in the Middle East.
The project uses a creative mixed-method approach to capture and spatialise the lived experience of injured patients. Fieldwork will be conducted in key borderland areas in Lebanon and Turkey in conjunction with local and international actors on the ground. This will consist of interviews with patients and medical-care workers, ethnographic methods focused on casualty evacuation routes and care facilities, and audio-visual documentation and mapping of patient journeys.
The project addresses ISRF goals by forging a new interdisciplinary methodology to tackle the socio-political problem of what happens to health and healthcare under conditions of war. By mapping the war-injured patient Wounds Without Borders develops new thinking about how injured patients are spatially reconfiguring healthcare infrastructures amidst one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our time.
If you would like to contact any of our Fellows to discuss their ISRF-funded work, please contact Dr Lars Cornelissen (Academic Editor) in the first instance, at [email protected].