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The Colonial Present, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. By DEREK GREGORY Blackwell, 2004, 367 pp. £16.99 paperback ISBN 1 577 180909
This book looks at the links between the grand strategies of geopolitics - the forms of political, military and economic power and their impact on ordinary people. Pervading all is what Gregory calls the 'colonial present - the constellations of power, knowledge, and geography that continue to colonize lives all over the world'. He borrows the term homo sacer - those who are outside the law, as defined by the sovereign power, as people who could be killed with impunity.
Gregory's analysis begins by looking at imaginative geographies, and illustrates this by the response of...