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Economies of Conflict: Reflecting on the (Re)Production of ‘War Economies’

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Abstract

War is an economy of violence that can take on, and transform into, many forms to meet the demands of the global political economy (GPE). Central to war and GPE are long institutionalized colonial narratives about where violence happens in the world. It is not coincidence that the ‘new’ known sites of global violence coincide with conventional economic understandings about which parts of the world have been colonized and exploited for their labour resources, are considered to be underdeveloped, and are in need of a variety of international interventions in order to be brought (back) into the global marketplace. The histories of GAD are central to understanding present conditions of conflict, human insecurity and proliferating ‘war economies’. In particular, this reflection is concerned with the gendered and racialized colonial histories of violence that frame how we understand the new sites of political and economic conflict and insecurity.

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© 2016 Heather Turcotte

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Turcotte, H. (2016). Economies of Conflict: Reflecting on the (Re)Production of ‘War Economies’. In: Harcourt, W. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-38273-3_32

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