A book panel on Catherine Lutz’s The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against US Military Posts and James Der Derian’s Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.
The two books paired on this panel present US military strategy and its consequences in stark contrasts. The solid reality of a quarter million US troops and employees massed in 1,000 overseas facilities, described in Catherine Lutz’s new Bases of Empire, will meet the virtual reality of high-tech, remote control warfare portrayed in James Der Derian’s new edition of Virtuous War. Moderator and Open Source internet radio host Christopher Lydon will engage the authors and audience in discussion of these geographic and virtual bases of 21st century war.
About the Authors
The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against US Military Posts (New York University Press, 2009), edited by Watson Institute professor and Brown anthropologist Catherine Lutz, details the impact and response to the approximately 1,000 military bases that the US has established overseas. While arguments for reducing the number of foreign bases were made early in the Bush administration, the number has only grown in the interim. So, too, have the globally networked social movements working to evict those bases or ameliorate their noxious environmental, political, and social effects. The book details those effects and the strategies and arguments of the anti-bases movements.
More information on the book is available here: http://www.nyupress.org/books/The_Bases_of_Empire-products_id-11032.html
Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Routledge, 2001 and 2009) is the first book to map the emergence and judge the consequences of a new military-industrial-media-entertainment network. James Der Derian, a Watson Institute professor and director of the Beyond Terrorism: Innovating Global Security and Global Media for the 21st Century, takes the reader from a family history of war and genocide to new virtual battlespaces in the Mojave Desert, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and American universities. He tracks the convergence of cyborg technologies, video games, media spectacles, war movies, and do-good ideologies that produced a chimera of high-tech, low-risk “virtuous wars.” In this newly updated edition, he reveals how a misguided faith in virtuous war to right the wrongs of the world instead paved the way for a flawed response to 9/11 and a disastrous war in Iraq. Blinded by virtue, emboldened by technological superiority, seized by a mimetic terror, the US blundered from one foreign fiasco to the next.
More information on the book is available here: http://www.routledge.com/books/Virtuous-War-isbn9780415772396
A video introduction to the book is available here: http://www.watsoninstitute.org/news_detail.cfm?id=1060
Location: Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
The panel will be preceded by book signing at 3:30 in the Watson Institute lobby.