Bloodlands: Critical Geographical Responses to the 22 July 2011 Events in Norway

These interventions reflect on the crimes that took place on a summer's day in Norway on 22 July 2011. But they are less about the figure of their perpetrator (whose motives remain at the centre of legal and psychiatric investigation by the Norwegian authorities) than provisional attempts to place the violence within broader interrogations of the geographies of extremism in contemporary Europe and elsewhere. Our chosen titleö`̀ Bloodlands''öwas intended to evoke both the events of that summer's day in Norway and the wider imagined geographies of the European extreme right, which are based on dreams of demographic purification and the restoration of an idealized `original' Europe. `Bloodlands' is also the term used by the historian Timothy Snyder (2010) to refer to the region stretching from Poznan to Smolensk that suffered a series of occupations and invasions in the 1930s and 1940s and where, he argues, murder and genocide were not incidental consequences of Nazi and Soviet policies, but central to their logics. For Snyder these bloodlands are not simply a metaphor; they describe historical geographies of genocide that the end of the Cold War in Europe has rendered more visibleöand hence nearer to the European present. Snyder's book is part of a wider and ongoing historical revaluation of the Second World War that has foregrounded the multiple geographical dimensions and sites of that conflict, as well as its continuing resonances in the present (see also Stone, 2012). When set against the post-1989 `unfreezing' of the past in Central and Eastern Europe, including the 1990s Balkan wars (echoing those in Cyprus in 1974 and the 1920s expulsions and pogroms that accompanied the collapse of the Ottoman Empire), Anders Breivik's manifesto Bloodlands: critical geographical responses to the 22 July 2011 events in NorwayÀ