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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Craig JonesORCiD, Ichamati Mousamputri, Dr Mark GriffithsORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Recent wars are marked by a political technology of “dual use” that blurs military and non-military worlds to legitimise military violence. This article sets out three key conceptualisations of dual use that further our understandings of contemporary military violence. Tracing the history of dual use discourses and infrastructures, we demonstrate how military and civilian worlds are disentangled from two diametrically opposed viewpoints: first, in humanitarian and legal efforts to codify civilian space in a way that counters dual use, and second in the instrumentalisation of dual use to legitimise military harm to civilian sites and bodies. The third conceptualisation we develop here—that we propose as an important contribution to geographical understandings of contemporary military violence—is that “dual use” as an idea and/or as a materially identifiable site, object, or body is a fiction of liberal lawmaking and warmaking. Drawing on the notion of ‘martial politics’ we argue that civilian and military spaces are importantly co-constitutive, co-produced, and thus only ever partially disentangled, if at all. Recognising the ethical risks of such an argument, we argue that focusing on the co-constitutive nature of civilian-military space must take a line away from parallel military logics (i.e., therefore everything is targetable) to instead fully excavate civilian-military contingencies to the ends of disrupting the means of distributing military violence.
Author(s): Jones C, Mousamputri I, Griffiths M
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Political Geography
Year: 2026
Volume: 127
Print publication date: 01/05/2026
Online publication date: 27/02/2026
Acceptance date: 21/02/2026
Date deposited: 02/03/2026
ISSN (print): 0962-6298
ISSN (electronic): 1873-5096
Publisher: Elsevier Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103525
DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103525
Data Access Statement: No data was used for the research described in the article.
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