Permanent URL: https://colonialcommunication.lboro.ac.uk/episodes/weaponizing-the-air/
Title: Coloniality and Communications: Weaponizing the Air (Episode 8)
Creator: Burçe Çelik; Sebastian James Rose
Contributors: Sena Başöz (video production, editing)
Data Provider: Loughborough University
Provider: Coloniality and Communications
Type: Sound
Format: Sound (AAC)
Is Shown At: https://colonialcommunication.lboro.ac.uk/episodes/weaponizing-the-air/
Date: 2025
Language: English
Description: This audio episode explores how airpower was conceptualized and operationalized as a weapon of colonial control in Mesopotamia and Palestine. Drawing on archival sources relating to Royal Air Force strategy, counterinsurgency practices, and colonial administration, the discussion examines how the air became a medium for surveillance, punishment, and territorial domination. The episode shows how aerial technologies were integrated into the communicative infrastructures of empire.
Subject: Air power, Colonial governance, Counterinsurgency, Mesopotamia, Palestine, British Empire, Military strategy, Colonial violence
Spatial Coverage: Mesopotamia (Iraq), Palestine
Temporal Coverage: 1918–1932
Rights: CC BY-NC 4.0
Rights Holder: Loughborough University
Is Part Of: Coloniality and Communications – Episodes
Source Institutions: BT Group Archives; The National Archives; Royal Air Force Collections
Project Context:
Coloniality and Communications: British Telecommunications in Mesopotamia in the Early 20th Century is an AHRC funded project run by Prof. Burçe Çelik (P.I.), Dr. Sebastian James Rose (Research Associate) at Loughborough University and artist Sena Başöz.
Coloniality and Communications unveils the historical role and legacy of British telecommunications in the making of colonial spatiality in Mesopotamia and the Middle East in the early 20th century. The project aims to advance decolonial research on media and communications through the epistemological force of regional and geopolitical history. By providing historical research on the past of colonial communications, this project aims to shift Westcentric conceptions, theoretical frameworks and received histories on media and communications.
Focusing on the interplay of communications and state building in Mesopotamia and Iraq from 1918 to 1932, the project challenges and questions existing paradigms in communication studies and the history of technology by asking: How were communications repurposed by the local people as forms of resistance? What roles did communications networks play in the making of colonial and national space? How did communications infrastructures, technologies and networks produce and reproduce colonial violence and control?
This recording was produced as part of the research project Coloniality and Communications: British Telecommunications in Mesopotamia in the Early 20th Century.
Learn more at the project website: https://colonialcommunication.lboro.ac.uk/
Related content can be accessed at https://colonialcommunication.lboro.ac.uk/episodes/