Exploring No-Man’s-Land in the 21st Century, by Robert Beckhusen

Following the end of World War I, Europe’s intellectuals tried to understand and explain what everyone just went through. They also tried to grapple with the reality of industrialized warfare and the no-man’s-lands it created.

Blasted, blown up and raked by machine gun fire. The no-man’s-land was a place that people couldn’t go without risking death.

Some thinkers on the political left saw no-man’s-land as symbolic of the destruction of Europe’s dying, traditional political order. However, intellectuals on the right saw the battlefield as a place where young men could be reborn into the fascist shock troops of Weimar Germany.

The fixed trenches of World War I are long gone. But the no-man’s-land never really went away, according to Noam Leshem, a political geographer at Durham University in England who studies modern no-man’s-lands.

From Cyprus, Western Sahara, the Palestinian territories to the Korean peninsula, no-man’s-lands are now tourist attractions, environmental preserves and places to make money.

Leshem’s work is available at Re-Inhabiting No-Man’s Land, a collection of writing and research on modern dead zones. In a fascinating discussion, we asked Leshem about what these places mean for the 21st century.

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