In the debut episode of The Control Zone, hosts Jessica Buxbaum and Kellie Kuenzle trace the long and contested history of military occupation, from its earliest legal foundations to the complex, technological systems of control we see today.

Their first guest, occupation studies scholar Peter Stirk, former director of the Centre for the History of Political Thought at Durham University, unpacks the origins of military occupation as a legal and political concept. Beginning with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, he explains how occupation emerged not simply as the presence of foreign troops, but as a distinct form of governance, one that claims authority without sovereignty.

From Napoleon’s armies in Europe to U.S. interventions in Cuba and Iraq, Stirk highlights a recurring theme across centuries: frustration. Occupying powers, he argues, frequently fail to achieve their ambitions, whether political, ideological or economic, revealing patterns of continuity that stretch into the present day.

The Control Zone is a podcast about occupation, its past, present and future, and the people resisting it. 

Peter Stirk is part of the Occupation Studies Research Network. Learn more about their work here. 

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