Forthcoming on The University of Minnesota Press, Spring 2027
What happens in the spaces where a soldier trained to kill the enemy is suddenly tasked with keeping them alive and delivering them to a detention facility? The Global Capture Chain: Infrastructures of US-Managed Military Detainment from Truman to Trump argues that these overlooked in-between places—the evacuation routes, collection points, vehicle journeys, legal protocols, and data systems connecting battlefield apprehension to detention—are not incidental to American military power but among its most revealing geographies.
Tracing US detention practices across eight decades and four major conflicts, the book introduces the capture chain as both a historical object and a methodological lens. From the improvised carceral logistics of the Korean War, where behavioral scientists turned prisoner of war camps into laboratories for new types of research, to the Vietnam-era marriage of airmobility and computation, to the extraordinary rendition networks and biometric databases of the post-9/11 era, The Global Capture Chain shows how the infrastructures connecting capture to the camp have grown progressively more elaborate, more technologically sophisticated, and more deeply contradictory.
These tensions between the distribution of death and the maintenance of life, the book argues, are neither hypocrisy nor evidence that American war is humane. They are instead foundational and unresolved organizational problems that have generated real infrastructure, real doctrine, and real violence.
Drawing on declassified military documents, behavioral science archives, Geneva Convention diplomatic records, technology specs, and soldier and prisoner memoirs, the book offers a history of American militarism told from one of its most overlooked geographies. It will be important reading for scholars and students of critical geography, military history, international humanitarian law, science and technology studies, and carceral studies, as well as general readers seeking to understand the deep roots of contemporary debates about drone warfare, mass surveillance, and the politics of humane war.