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War, Violence and Population: Making the Body Count

The view famously expressed by US General Tommy Franks, that “we don’t do body counts”, still resonates in many government circles. For those seeking demographic statistics this is an unfortunate consequence of the chaos of war and violence; for others, a disregard for the scale of death is a planned and desirable goal of military operations. It is fitting then that James Tyner begins his exploration of war and violence amongst the mass graves and scattered monuments of the “killing fields” of Cambodia. No one accurately knows how many individuals, deemed to be “enemies” of the Khmer Rouge state, were murdered here. The victims did not “count” in life; nor were they counted in death. It is the planned and calculated management of such horrors, and in particular the role played by geographical logics in the organization of such campaigns of violence, that Tyner attempts to uncover in this passionate and accessible introduction to the field of population geography. Drawing loosely from the work of Michel Foucault, Tyner highlights the ways in which individual bodies and entire populations have been the subjects of violent disciplinary and regulatory technologies. In particular, the book details the dark-side of biopolitics, or how sovereign states have mobilized war and violence in order to eliminate certain populations, and create new population geographies. Tyner situates these theoretical questions within three case studies, each of which provides gut-wrenching accounts of war and genocide that seek to supplement a more critical engagement with established quantitative population geographies. In the first case study, Tyner argues that his analysis of the importance of population geography in the Vietnam War is “not to highlight the firepower, but rather to emphasize the biopower” (p. 50). It was this conflict that saw the rise of the twentieth century’s fascination with the “body count”, and also the related decline in the importance of territory. Tyner traces the role that a calculated management of life played in the campaign; from the quantitative management of troop deployments and the development of more “efficient” cluster bombs, to the war on the environment and the enemy “neutralization” campaigns of Operation Phoenix. These planning decisions suggest that large body counts should not merely be regarded as an unfortunate consequence of conflict, but also as a key indicator of the operational success of the campaign; namely the disciplining of the Vietnamese population. Tyner suggests that “[n]ever was a war so clearly a technique of depopulation as was the war in Vietnam” (p. 75). Whilst this may be true in the context of modern warfare, an analysis of the origins of war and mass-murder as tools of population regulation should take into account the longer history of such policies in European colonial possessions. European Planning Studies Vol. 18, No. 1, January 2010