← Back to Concept Indexdesert-nomadism
The lifestyle and tactics of desert nomads who, influenced by oil politics, form militarized, mobile entities that interact with and transform state power structures.
1 chapter across 1 book
1. In countries with detailed homeland security protocols or relatively high levels of alertness, where ground or aerial operations (hostile, subversive or stealth activities) cannot be conducted, the emergence of intricate poromechanical entities escalates, and cannot be avoided. In such countries, the distribution of illegal immigrants or smuggled products such as drugs and weapons around the border regions does not proceed by way of patterns of activities on the surface, but through the formation and the architecture of nested holeyness beneath the ground. Activities or lines of movement (tactics) cannot be separated from the architecture of such ( )hole complexes. According to military experts or urban planners with military educations, criminal and hostile activities can no longer be explained, analyzed or traced in terms of land, aerial and water levels. These activities conform only (paranoically speaking) to structures of vast underground nemat-spaces and their constantly displacing and vermiculating lines of emergence (schizoid formations of surfaces). The distribution, escalation and diffusion of complicities is identical to different aspects of hole-trafficking. For military experts, the terror market is simultaneously that of the porosities of earth. Cross-border wormholes under the US-Mexico border, tunnels under Gaza-Egypt, and all other examples of hole trafficking, confound the polarities of surface globalization and its Politico-military facets. The economic and power formations of clandestine Guerilla-states, anti-State movements and ambiguously Imperialist states configure themselves according to the poromechanics of war.This chapter explores the concept of 'poromechanics' as a framework for understanding clandestine and hostile activities that evade surface-level detection through complex underground networks, or '( )hole complexes.' It analyzes how military tactics, geopolitical conflicts, and economic-political formations—especially in border regions and oil-rich deserts—are shaped by subterranean architectures and nomadic movements, highlighting the mutual contamination between states and desert-nomads through oil-driven poromechanics. The chapter also discusses the paradoxical and treacherous nature of these underground spaces as both counter-hegemonic and hegemonic forces influencing global war, terror, and power dynamics.