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Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War. By Michael J. Shapiro. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 241p. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.
Ronen Palan, University of Sussex
The title of this book does not prepare the reader for the scope and ambition of the project. Far from being a rehashed version of the familiar if fashionable concern with conceptual, analytical, and discursive boundaries, it lays the groundwork for an alternative, ethnographic approach to security studies.
Shapiro's premise is that there can be two approaches to security studies. The conventional one takes its cue from Clausewitz and views the use of violence as a purposeful instrument of state policy. This approach has largely lodged within what is called a realist theory of power and state action. Shapiro advances an alternative ethnographic or "ontological" approach, however, which seeks "to attenuate identity commitments by reflecting on the boundary practices and history-making narratives by which they are shaped" (p. 138).
Drawing on Hegelian-Freudian-Lacanian theories of subjectivity, Shapiro argues that violence and the use of force are instruments of identity construction. According to these theories, self and identity, whether in the construction of the ego or the construction of the superego of the social collectivity, are an interactive social process. Interestingly, and correctly in my view, Shapiro does not identify with the fashionable symbolic interactionist theories of the self; rather, he delves deeper...