Speculative realism in the Middle East: Rethinking war and terror after Operation Desert Storm
Channel: War Studies KCL
Date: 27/01/2021

As the first fully 'mediatised' war, Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm (1990-1991) are regarded as a watershed event. This applies not only to Middle East observers or ‘conventional’ conflict and security studies experts.

It also caught the imagination of contemporary philosophers, with Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991) causing considerable controversy, whereas Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light (2002) by Paul Virilio received serious attention in the defence sector. Drawing also on other postmodern thinkers, such as Gilles Deleuze, it stimulated the unconventional rethinking of military operations by, for example, Israeli General Shimon Naveh.

In the wake of 9/11 and new military interventions in the Muslim world (Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003), these ideas received a further lease of life in the political theology of Reza Negarestani, a philosopher from the school of Speculative Realism.

The 30th anniversary of the 1990-1 Gulf War is used as an occasion to tie together these developments and assess the impact on the imaginative rethinking of conflict and terror of such notions as ‘war machine’, ‘smooth vs striated space’, ‘concealment’ (taqiyya) and ‘takfiri-jihadism’.