the mo’ai period); Pirates and Priests (in the 19th century when kidnapping, Christianity, colonial-ism and contamination dominated island affairs); Rancho Isla de Pascua (the company sheepranch perioddIsla de Pascua is Rapa Nui’s Spanish name); and finally Museum Island. The chap-ters are long, but with some sub-headings, and the prose is quite dense but moves the story alongand Fischer tells it in all its considerable complexity, certainly more than can be summarised inthis short review. The one disappointment is with the book’s presentation. Other than on thedust jacket there is no decent depiction of a mo’ai or of anything else. There is a miserable rationof only 15 illustrations and they are printed in the top third of the page on rather coarse paper,which has not aided reproduction (though perhaps the paper quality is reflected in the book’s rea-sonable cover price). Worse still, the one detailed map (p. 32) is of the same pitiful size which hasnecessitated reducing its lettering so much to make most place names illegible to the naked eye.The author obviously went to immense trouble and effort in the writing process, what a shamesimilar effort was not given to the presentation of the visual material.

Stephen A. RoyleQueen’s University Belfast, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2005.11.009

235Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 220e248

Colin Flint (Ed), The Geography of War and Peace: From Death Camps to Diplomats, Oxford,Oxford University Press, 2005, xviC462 pages, £35.00 paperback.

The Geography of War and Peace shows how, currently, political geographers are studying someof the many issues raised and questions posed by armed conflict and military violence. As ColinFlint notes in his editor’s introduction, more than ten years have elapsed since the publication ofthe last edited volume on the geography of war and peace. The Geography of War and Peacepresents an updated look at the connections between the discipline of Geography, geographicalprocesses and practices, and armed conflict. It is a book of its time, as were Kliot and Waterman’sThe Political Geography of Conflict and Peace (Belhaven, 1991) with its focus on the aftermath andglobal security implications of the Soviet Collapse, and Pepper and Jenkins’ Geography of Peaceand War (Blackwell, 1985), dominated by the nuclear threats of the Cold War. This volume, too,is a reflection on a historical moment, in its arguments on the meaning of contemporary and re-cent conflicts for our understanding of the spatiality of military violence, and in its explorationson the utility of fresh conceptual insights in helping us understand military violence and militaryengagement in the past.

Almost inevitably, edited collections like these are simultaneously useful and limited. This col-lection is useful in the range of topics covered, from world-systems approaches to the internation-al drugs trade, from gender politics in combat to geographies of diplomacy. It is limited (and Flintrecognises this) by its very nature as an edited volume, reflecting only how a specific group ofpolitical geographers, based in North America, Europe (Netherlands and the UK) and Israel,approach a select group of topics and conflicts. As with any collection of this kind, its longevitywill be measured by the strength and utility of the individual chapters.

236 Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 220e248

The overarching narrative of this collection is an argument for the explanatory power of a tra-ditional and straightforward political geography approach in examining and explaining armedconflict. The book distances itself from the approach of critical geopolitics, and ignores the widergeographies of militarism evident in non-conflict situations. It stays close to the binary of ‘war’and ‘peace’ and offers a collection of essays anchored in the staple themes of political geography:territoriality, borders, regionalization, and recent conceptual developments concerning the signif-icance of networks and theorisations of scale.

The structure of the book is straightforward. The book opens with a first section of four chap-ters outlining the theoretical and conceptual foundations of political geography’s approach to warand peace. Jeremy Black outlines a brief traditionalist history of geography and war, Herman vander Wusten examines the connections between geography, violence and development and JohnO’Loughin reviews civil wars. The strongest chapter of the first section is Virginie Mamadouh’scomprehensive overview of geography’s disciplinary engagement with war, tracing the discipline’shistory from active engagement with military power (an approach which endures in the sub-dis-cipline of military geography, still popular in the US) through to the growth within global geo-graphical scholarship of critical approaches to armed conflict, its causes and consequences.

The second section, on the geographies of war, presents eleven chapters which deal (mostly)with the causes of war. These range from identity issues, through explorations of resource disputesand armed conflict, to issues of territory and boundaries. Gertjan Dijkink writes on soldiers andnationalism. Lorraine Dowler looks at gender and representation in revolutionary Ireland and atGround Zero following the 9/11 attacks. Roger Stump analyses the intersection and interactionsbetween war and religion. Carl Dahlman writes on the geographies of genocide and ethnic cleans-ing. Colin Flint explores the geographies (or ‘metageographies’) of terrorism. Philippe Le Billontakes us through resource wars. Michael Steinberg and Kent Mathewson explore the role of psy-choactive drugs in war. Leila Harris reviews the debates over the link between water resources andarmed conflict. Alexander Murphy writes about regimes of territorial legitimation within states.Ghazi Falah examines the strategies of the Israeli state in justifying its territorial claims. DavidNewman looks at borders and boundaries in contemporary ethnonational conflicts.

The third section, on the geographies of peace, presents four very different chapters (‘peace’ being,perhaps, harder to define and contain than ‘war’). GuntramHerb explores the geographies of peacemovements. Alan Henrikson examines the geography of diplomacy. Ian Oas writes on Hungarianparticipation in NATO. Brendan Soennecken discusses the geopolitics of postwar recovery.

The absence of a concluding chapter is notable, demonstrating the difficulty of pulling togetherso many different ideas, arguments, issues and experiences, from so many different conflicts andapproaches to conflicts. Perhaps this absence demonstrates something significant about the spa-tiality of armed conflict, that its depths and varieties defy neat categorisation. Still, this is a usefulbook to have on the shelves. The preparations, practice and consequences of military violence de-fine the lives of so many of us and so much of the world, and this volume goes some way towardsdemonstrating the necessity of geographical scholarship’s engagement with this issue.

Rachel WoodwardUniversity of Newcastle, UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2005.11.010