Warrior Geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and the Kingdom of Heaven
By Simon Dalby
Paper given at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (2007)
Abstract: The “war on terror” and remilitarization of political anxiety in the aftermath of September 11th in the West, is both facilitated and challenged by representations of geopolitical danger and the supposed necessity for warriors to fight wars in distant lands.
Ridley Scott’s three movies, “Gladiator”, “Black Hawk Down” and most recently “The Kingdom of Heaven” explore the morality and identity of warriors. They do so in exotic landscapes and settings that emphasize the confrontation with danger as external and frequently unknowable and political violence as something that has complicated geographies.
From the putative left in the case Michael Ignatieff and the Warrior’s Honor or the right in the case of Robert Kaplan’s Warrior Politics, the public discussion of the necessity for warfare and “intervention” is enmeshed in discourses of moralities, rights and “just war”. The professional Western warrior, whether a special forces operative or garrison soldier in peacekeeping mode, is a key figure of the post September 11th era, physically securing the West, and simultaneously securing its identity as the repository of virtue against barbaric threats to civilization. These themes are key to Ridley Scott’s work.
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