ABSTRACT
This book will explore the contested worlds of contemporary human geography. As has become very evident over the course completing this book, the world is full of contests and contestations, many of which are violent and bloody. When this book was initially commissioned, the thought of two aeroplanes being flown into and demolishing one of the world’s largest buildings and causing the death of some 2,700 people was to most people unimaginable. It was widely argued that the end of the ‘Cold War’ between East and West would herald the onset of a period of world peace. However, since that time there has been two ‘Gulf Wars’ (1990, 2003), the second of which was rhetorically linked to a wider ‘War on terrorism’ and which also involved an invasion of Afghanistan in 2002. There have also been a series of ‘Balkan Wars’ in the 1990s, plus a host of other ‘civil’ wars in places such as Eritrea, Haiti, Rwanda, Somalia and Uganda. Rather than being a period of peace, the late twentieth and early twenty-first century might be characterised as a period of widening warfare, terrorism, genocide and torture.
