US Actions in the War on Terror – Three Spatial Scales of State Violence

About the Project

The digital storytelling project “US Actions in the War on Terror – Three Spatial Scales of State Violence” explores three spatial aspects of detainee torture and abuse committed by the US during the George W. Bush administration. Data from hundreds of government documents released via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests were reviewed manually, scraped using Python, and analyzed to better understand how space and place formed components of the use of violence by US in this context and how patterns of abuse intersected with different spatial scales. The digital story is organized around these three scales through which violence was enacted:

SCALE 1: National and Detention Site Scales – the Locations of Reported Incidents

SCALE 2: Transnational & Geopolitical Scales

SCALE 3: Intimate Scales of Violence – Confinement and the Body