The project ‘Fifth Geneva Convention’ consists of a series of roundtable conferences designed to debate the ethical, political and material dimensions of the legal means of protection of the ‘natural environment’ in times of armed conflict as defined by international humanitarian law.

While freedom has been the most important motif of accounts of human history since the Enlightenment, there has never been an awareness of the geological agency human beings were gaining through processes linked to their acquisition of freedom. Whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions that work like boundary parameters of human existence.

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Evil media studies is not a discipline, nor is it the description of a category of particularly unpleasant media objects. It is a manner of working with a set of informal practices and bodies of knowledge, characterised as stratagems, which pervade contemporary networked media and which straddle the distinction between the work of theory and of practice. Evil media studies deliberately courts the accusation of anachronism so as to both counter and to enhance the often tacit deception and trickery within the precincts of both theory and practice.

In jointly approaching Marxism and anarchism to draw from them intellectual and strategic resources for contemporary anti-capitalism can we avoid the tiresome alternative between the production of sterile doctrinal hybrids, on the one hand, and the neurotic revisiting of the primal scene of separation, on the other? The wager of this talk is that turning to anarchist and Marxist lineages in geographical thought might help us to avoid the dull commonplaces of polemic – whether this will define new frontlines or forge unexpected alliances, I leave open.