This week the London School of Economics, Goldsmiths, the Imperial War Museum, British Academy together with openDemocracy are launching a series of lectures, film shows, book launches and discussion to explore and commemorate the fact that one hundred years ago this November, the world was irrevocably and significantly altered. The development of aerial bombardment, initially over Libya by an Italian pilot, would create and routinise a new kind of warfare. The character of violent conflict was transformed along with the legal and moral systems that made it intelligible.

Though fire and rocketry were old weapons, the risks of warcraft were acutely redistributed in the novel discrepancy between bombers and bombed. Terror itself became a weapon. Attackers from above were virtually inaccessible while those they attacked beneath were rendered absolutely vulnerable. Any distinction between combatants and non-combatants, civilians and soldiery was rapidly outmoded. It is our contention that development of aerial bombardment was more than just a military revolution. Through a careful examination of its history we can understand differently the history of empire, nationalism and the racial ordering of humanity. Read on...

Shock and Awe Conference Shock and Awe Speakers openDemocracy bombing archive


Classic Text: Extract from Virginia Woolf's "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid"


The other Israeli war on Gaza

Sameh Habeeb 24 February 2012
The drones are unmanned aerial planes controlled by central computers in Israel. Israelis use them to monitor the Gaza Strip for ‘security reasons.’

Commemorating Saigon, 11 December 1961: a date on the dark side of history

Dan Clayton 11 December 2011
US helicopters and their crews arrived in Saigon on December 11 1961, ostensibly to take South Vietnamese troops deep into the jungle to wage what US advisors deemed to be a new kind of war: guerrilla warfare. Many see this event as the start of the Vietnam War.

Lines of descent

Derek Gregory 8 November 2011
To mark one hundred years of aerial bombing, we publish this detailed account of the path that led us from bombing cities, forests and target boxes to putting 'warheads on foreheads' in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Derek Gregory argues that our understanding of bombing has been dominated by political and military historians who focus on strategy and social historians who recover the experiences of those who were bombed. But that today the gap between the two – the kill-chain – is too important to be left to buffs and geeks. Read Gregory’s introduction – The American way of bombing: and visit our Shock and Awe conference page.

The American way of bombing?

Derek Gregory 27 October 2011
‘Signature targets’ are ghostly traces of the ‘target signatures’ that once animated the electronic battlefield. Commentators have often drawn comparisons between the wars in Vietnam and in Afghanistan, but if Vietnam was a ‘quagmire’ then the air wars over Afghanistan-Pakistan threaten to create a vortex. See the Closing Session of the Shock and Awe conference.

A hundred years of bombing: what has it done to us?

Paul Gilroy and Les Back 18 October 2011
November 2011 marks the centenary of a world-historic event. An Italian pilot, Guilio Cavotti dropped the first bombs from an aeroplane on to the oasis of Tagiura outside Tripoli. The development of aerial bombardment was more than just a military revolution. It changed both war and peace. openDemocracy is the media partner for Shock and Awe: a hundred years of bombing from above and this is an invitation to a debate.

Civilians bombed in Sudan border state

Josephine Whitaker 19 July 2011
Civilians bombed in Sudan border state. British army cut, reserves bolstered. Yemeni security forces begin offensive to retake Zinjibar. First Afghan province handed over to local forces. Court orders withdrawal from Cambodian temple. All this and more in today’s security briefing...

NATO’s collateral tyrannicide

Tjebbe van Tijen 7 May 2011
Will the killing of Osama Bin Laden bring justice and peace to the world? There is a growing body of evidence reaching back through the centuries, to suggest that it will not.

Libya: popular revolt, military intervention

Martin Shaw 7 April 2011
The changing dynamics of the Libyan conflict highlight the contradictions of "humanitarian intervention" when pressed to serve the western way of war, says Martin Shaw.

Forensic Architecture and the speech of things: a conversation

Eyal Weizman and Rosemary Bechler 13 September 2010

In part two of our coverage of the Paul Hirst Memorial Lecture, 2010 , Eyal Weizman, in conversation with openDemocracy editor, Rosemary Bechler, discusses the challenge of how to use international humanitarian law to permit the articulation of progressive political demands, and why this involves a sure grasp of the kind of elastic space he called the ‘political plastic’

Security in Iraq deteriorates in the wake of US troop withdrawal

Carly Nyst

A series of blasts in Shi'ite Muslim areas of Baghdad and northern Iraq killed 41 people on Monday, raising fears of a deterioration in the security situation since US forces withdrew from urban centres in June.

Sri Lanka continues bombing of "safe zone"

Oliver Scanlan

Mexican ambassador and UN Security Council President Claude Heller announced today that in the view of the council, withholding an IMF loan from the Sri Lankan government was "unnecessary".

To the mountain

John Berger
Iraq, the Republic of Fear under Saddam, is now ruled by a Coalition of Fear. The distinguished writer John Berger said on the eve of war that lies prepare the way for missiles. Now he sees revealed in the desperate chaos of Baghdad the blindness of a force whose pitiless weaponry and limitless ambition offer no insight into the truths of its conquest.

“If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.” George W. Bush

Baghdad has fallen. The city has been taken by the troops who were bringing it freedom.

The stone bomb

Patrick Wright
In response to the horrors of imperial air warfare in Ethiopia, Burma, and India in the 1930s, the sculptor Eric Benfield and the socialist-feminist Sylvia Pankhurst turned political passion into art with a unique Anti-Air War Memorial.

A long or a short war?

Paul Rogers
At the outset of the Iraq war, five different projections of its character and timescale were available. After eight days of fighting, which now seems most convincing? And does the unthinkable – US defeat – remain so?

After eight days of war in Iraq, there is growing evidence that the campaign is not going the way the US and Britain wanted or expected. The situation remains very fluid, with an enormous amount of misinformation coming from both sides.

Civilian casualties in Afghanistan: the limits of Marc Herold's 'comprehensive accounting'

Jeffrey C. Isaac
Marc Herold’s report on the civilian victims of US bombing in Afghanistan has gained wide circulation. But are his own methods and conclusions reliable?On 10 December 2001 Marc W. Herold, a professor in the departments of economics and women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire, publicly released A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States’ Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting. Herold claims that (up to that date) over 3,500 Afghan civilians had been killed by American bombs.
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