Deborah Cowen

Cowen follows the trail of a word. Logistics was a branch of military science, the one concerned with supplying an army on the move, and it passed into business in the mid-twentieth century carrying its way of thinking with it: the aim is that flow must not stop, and anything that interrupts it is a threat to be neutralised.

There lies her uncomfortable thesis. When a port, a rail corridor or a distribution hub is classified as critical infrastructure, a dockers' strike, a protest blocking a road or an Indigenous blockade of a line ceases to be a labour or political conflict and is handled as a security problem. Cowen documents how that reclassification has changed law, policing and the design of logistical space itself.

The other part of her work is geographical. The supply chain produces its own territories that do not coincide with municipalities: free zones with their own labour regime, corridors crossing whole countries, ports operating as enclaves. Inside them different rules apply from the rest of the city, and those who work there have fewer rights than people a hundred metres beyond the fence.

A Canadian geographer and professor at the University of Toronto, Cowen earlier wrote Military Workfare (2008), on the army as a social welfare institution. The Deadly Life of Logistics (2014) is her central book and has reoriented urban research on ports, warehouses and freight. Her recent work, with Indigenous colleagues, analyses infrastructure as a form of colonial occupation of territory.