The ways that other places, people, and landscapes are represented; how these imaginings reflect the preconceptions and desires of their inventors, and the relations of power between subjects and objects thereof (E. Said 1979). Thus, with independence, Singapore’s ruling party sought to transform ‘a group of people with divergent orientations…into a populace of loyal citizens’ (L. Kong and B. Yeoh 2003). D. Gregory (2004) argues that, since 9/11, the United States has re-imaged the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, and ‘light’ against ‘darkness’: ‘orientalism [is] abroad again’. Jeffrey (2007) Area 38, 2 argues that viewing the 1992–5 conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a humanitarian, rather than a political, crisis, justified military and NGO intervention. See Schwartz (1996) J. Hist. Geog. 22, 1 on imaginative geographies of the 19th century.