Graham S. (2004), Cities, warfare, and States of Emergency
Graham S. (2004), “Introduction : Cities, warfare, and States of Emergency”, Cities, War, and Terrorism, Wiley-Blackwel, pp.1-27
Cities, warfare, and organized political violence have always been mutual constructions.
p.1
The widespread survival of massive urban fortifications- especially in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe- are a living testaments to the fact that, in premodern and pre-nation-state civilization, city-states were the actual agents, as well as the main targets, of war.
“Myths of urban ruin grow at our culture’s root” (Berman, 1996)
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as modern nation-states started to emerge in Europe as “bordered power containers”, they began seeking a monopoly on political violence (Giddens, 1985b).
The expanding imperial and metropolitan cities that lay at the core of nation-states were no longer organizers of their own armies and defenses, but they maintained political power and reach. Such cities directed violence, control, repression, and the colonial acquisition of territory, raw material, wealth, and labor power from afar (Driver and Gilbert, 2003)
Right up to the start of the twenty-first century, then, the capture of strategic and politically important cities remains “the ultimate symbol of conquest and national survival” (Shaw, 2001:1)
In fact, the deliberate destruction and targeting of cities and their support systems in time of war and crisis is a constant throughout the 8,000 years, or so of urban history on our planet
p.2
While far from new, acts of war and terror against cities and their inhabitants are saturating our world. For centuries, it has not been feasible to contain cities within defensive walls or effective cordons which protect their citizens from military force (Virilio, 1987). Just as it no longer adequate to theorize cities as local, bounded sites that are separated off from the rest of the world, so similarly, political violence is now fueled and sustained by transnational networks that can be global and local at the same time.
While they remain major site of military, economic, and regulatory power, nation-states are becoming increasingly “decentred”. Within a context of neolibeeral globalization, transnational flows between cities and metropolitain regions, and the grow of transnational governance, are undermining their coherence and meaning.
Traditional state vs. state war, driven by imperial or geopolitical imperatives of maintaining, or expanding, national territories, are now rare events deserving special historical scrutiny. In their place, non-traditional, “asymmetric,” informal”, or “new” war are proliferating (Kaldor, 1999)
p.3
Some even argue that the imperative of “security” is beginning to overwhelm the other, historic functions of nation-states that were built up over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (such as social welfare, education, health, infrastructure development, economic regulation, and planning).
In the “new” wars of the post-Cold war era – which increasingly straddle the “technological gaps” separating advanced industrial nations from informal fighters –cities are the key sites. Indeed, urban areas are now the lightning conductors” for the world’s political violence. Warfare, like everything else, is being urbanized? The great geopolitical contests of cultural changes, ethnic conflict, and diasporic social mixing; of economic reregulation and liberalization; of militarization, informatization, resource exploitation, and ecological change are, to growing extent, boiling up to often violent conflicts in the key strategic sites of our age: contemporary cities (Sassen, 2002b).
p.4
Castastrophic urban terrorist attacks – fueled by religious or political radicalism, anti-modernism, or resistance to brutal occupation, repression, or perceived biases of globalization – have also targeted urban sites in Madrid, Kitay (Bali), Moscow, Mumbai (Bombay), and Karachi; Jakarta, Casablanca, Delhi, and Islamabad; Riyadh, Mombassa, Kabul, Istanbul, and Nairobi.
Nor should we forget the leveling of Groznyy by the Russians in 1996; the siege of Sarajevo and Mostar in the Balkan wars of the early 1990s; the LA riots of 1992; the US’s bloody incursion into Mogadishu in 1993; the continuing sucide bombing in Israel bars, buses, and malls; Israel’s bulldozing of Jenin and Nablus in spring 2002 and its continuing policies of strangulation, immiseration, and demolition against Palestinian cities;
Both cities and organized violence are “rescaling” together as they are remade through transnational connections, technologies, diasporas, and flows, which tend to transcend and undermine the (always fleeting and violently enforced) stability of Cold War blocs or modern nation-states (Daldy, 2000; Giddens, 1985b).
p.5
For these, too, are unleashing powerful processes of “creative destruction” which tend to intensify the roles of strategic, subnational spaces and city regions in economic governance and social spaces and city regions in economic governance and social, cultural, and political change (Brenner and Theodore, 2002).
Far from going away, then, strategies of deliberately attacking the systems and places that support civilian urban life have only become more sophisticated since the mass, total, urban annihilation that characterized the twentieth century.
p.6
Cities are often located on the fault-lines between cultures- between modernizing societies and traditional cultures; between individual-based and community based economies; between democracy and more authoritarian regimes; between colonial governments and native populations
Bollens, 2001: 179
Appadurai helps us understand why contempry warfare and terror now largely boil down over the spaces, symbols, meaning, support systems, or power structures of cities and urban places. As throughout the history of war, such struggles are fueled by dichotomized constructions of “us” and an “othered” them – the target…the enemy…the hated. “War…mobilizes the highly charged and dangerous dialectic of place attachment,” writes Ken Hewitt. This involves “the perceived antithesis of ‘our’ places or homeland and ‘theirs’, an unbridled sentimentalizing of one’s own while dehumanizing the enemy’s people and land (1983: 258)
p.8
In attempting to split an intrinsically mobile, heterogenous,, and urbanizing world into jigsaw-like pieces of territory- which are assumed to have essential and “pure” identities- such views fundamentally and violently challenge the reality of cities and urban life on oour planet (Laguerre, 2003). As throughout urban history, in these times of intensifying globalization urban areas are crucial enters of heterogeneous mixing. Increasingly, the differences, tolerances, and hatreds of the globe are inseparably related to, and constituted through, day-to-day encounters, and cosmopolitan accommodations (and frictions) in the streetscaoes, schools, city halls, and neighborhoods of cities.
On the other hand, Bush’s neoconservative and neo-imperial “was on terror” also problematizes such urban cosmopolitanism. It, too, undermines both the possibility and the legitimacy of city-based democratic pluralism and dissent against the “new global order”. In asserting a binaried split between “the civilized and savage throughout the social circuitry,” the war on terror rhetoric of the Bush regime, and the policies based on it have produces a “constant scrutiny of those who bear the sign of ‘dormant’ terrorist.”. It has also “activated a policing points of vulnerability against an enemy who inheres within the space of the US” (Passavant and Dean, 2002; cited in Geogory, 2003).
p.9-10
The “hybrid”, transnational identities of many neighborhoods and communities in cities, shaped by generations of transnational migration and diasporic mixing, are thus becoming problematized. Inevitably, such places and groups are being “stretched” across the resurgent “them and us” or “home and foreign” binaries that are being imposed. Many people, spaces, and communities in Western cities are thus becoming “othered” simply because they are perceived to be associated with ‘Arab’ or Muslim terrorist’” (Hall, 2003).
p.11
As globe-spanning, geostrategic concerns blur into local, urban spaces, all of a sudden it seems normal for Western cities to face a palpable militarization previously more common in cities of the global South. Tanks protect airports. Troops guard rail stations. Surface-to-air missiles sit around office block housing meeting of international leaders. Combat air patrol buzz around Manhattan and London. New York street police now carry pocketsize radiation detectors in the hope that they might detect any nuclear “dirty bombs” smuggled into the metropolitan area. Us postal sorting depots now have automatic anthrax sniffers. New York’s Grand Central Station now has automatic bio-weapons detectors. And in a curious replay of earlier debates about strategic bombing and nuclear war, some commentators in the United States have even argued that the risk of terrorism – and particularly the risk that such attacks will utilize nuclear, chemical, and biological “Weapon of Mass Destruction” – mean that large, central cities should be actively decentralized (Swanstrom, 2002; see Glaeser and Shapiro,2002; Coaffee, 2003b)
p.12
In this ‘state of emergency” the normal rules of civilian, democratic law are being supplanted or replaced (Agamben, 1998, 2002). In their place come emergency, eecutive powers, and covert state actions which are justified – when discussed at all – because of the “temporary” imperatives of “national security,” the post-9/11 “crisis,” or the demands of a globe-spanning “war on terror”. At the same time, the laws of war are being reshaped to accommodate routine, state-backed, high-tech violence against cities and essential urban infrastructures (Smith, 2002, Naumann, 2003).
p.13-14
Thus, a global vicious circle is now established along the lines so familiar in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. State-backed terror, atrocity, and crimes against humanity breed informal terrorist atrocity and crimes against humanity. States respond with more of the same while invoking states of emergency and cultures of fear. These, in turn, allow legal restraints to be dispensed with more state-backed terror. Such state violence goes on the deepen resentment, recruit more volunteers, and exacerbate the intransigence, or ethic of martyrdom, that sustains the growing ranks of willing suicide bombers (Hage, 2003)
p.14
Crucially, from thje point of view of this book, such constructions of states of emergency and fear are changing the very tenor of urban culture and society (Molotch and McClain, 2003). Many urban societies which are already experiencing widespread fragmentation forressing are seeing these processes amplified further as people seek to “capsularize” themselves away from people, experiences, and spaces that they perceive as risky, vulnerable, or unpredictable (De Cauter, 2004; Graham and Marvin, 2001, Ellin, 1997; Gold and Revill, 2000)
p.16
Such strategies will not completely undermine the role of cities as dense sites of heterogeneous, unpredictable mixing. Cities are far too complex, porous, ans multi-dimensional to be somehow “programmed” by computers and surveillance systems (Graham and Marvin, 2001).
p.16
The current state of emergency is combining with preexisting processes of urban militarization. As part of the growth of neoliberal policy, many states have been militarizing their systems of criminal justice, law enforcement, and public space regulation, bringing the weapons, doctrines, and technologies of war to the streets of cities and the borders of nation (Nunn, 2001; Kraska, 2001; Garland, 2001; Young, 1999).
p.17
Instead of the “military-industrial complex”, Pieterse talks of an emerging “criminal-industrial complex” or “security-industrial complex,” which straddles home-domestic and international-foreign scales (Pieterse, 2002:3)
p.17
Cities, warfare, and organized political violence have always been mutual constructions.
p.1
The widespread survival of massive urban fortifications- especially in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe- are a living testaments to the fact that, in premodern and pre-nation-state civilization, city-states were the actual agents, as well as the main targets, of war.
“Myths of urban ruin grow at our culture’s root” (Berman, 1996)
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as modern nation-states started to emerge in Europe as “bordered power containers”, they began seeking a monopoly on political violence (Giddens, 1985b).
The expanding imperial and metropolitan cities that lay at the core of nation-states were no longer organizers of their own armies and defenses, but they maintained political power and reach. Such cities directed violence, control, repression, and the colonial acquisition of territory, raw material, wealth, and labor power from afar (Driver and Gilbert, 2003)
Right up to the start of the twenty-first century, then, the capture of strategic and politically important cities remains “the ultimate symbol of conquest and national survival” (Shaw, 2001:1)
In fact, the deliberate destruction and targeting of cities and their support systems in time of war and crisis is a constant throughout the 8,000 years, or so of urban history on our planet
p.2
While far from new, acts of war and terror against cities and their inhabitants are saturating our world. For centuries, it has not been feasible to contain cities within defensive walls or effective cordons which protect their citizens from military force (Virilio, 1987). Just as it no longer adequate to theorize cities as local, bounded sites that are separated off from the rest of the world, so similarly, political violence is now fueled and sustained by transnational networks that can be global and local at the same time.
While they remain major site of military, economic, and regulatory power, nation-states are becoming increasingly “decentred”. Within a context of neolibeeral globalization, transnational flows between cities and metropolitain regions, and the grow of transnational governance, are undermining their coherence and meaning.
Traditional state vs. state war, driven by imperial or geopolitical imperatives of maintaining, or expanding, national territories, are now rare events deserving special historical scrutiny. In their place, non-traditional, “asymmetric,” informal”, or “new” war are proliferating (Kaldor, 1999)
p.3
Some even argue that the imperative of “security” is beginning to overwhelm the other, historic functions of nation-states that were built up over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (such as social welfare, education, health, infrastructure development, economic regulation, and planning).
In the “new” wars of the post-Cold war era – which increasingly straddle the “technological gaps” separating advanced industrial nations from informal fighters –cities are the key sites. Indeed, urban areas are now the lightning conductors” for the world’s political violence. Warfare, like everything else, is being urbanized? The great geopolitical contests of cultural changes, ethnic conflict, and diasporic social mixing; of economic reregulation and liberalization; of militarization, informatization, resource exploitation, and ecological change are, to growing extent, boiling up to often violent conflicts in the key strategic sites of our age: contemporary cities (Sassen, 2002b).
p.4
Castastrophic urban terrorist attacks – fueled by religious or political radicalism, anti-modernism, or resistance to brutal occupation, repression, or perceived biases of globalization – have also targeted urban sites in Madrid, Kitay (Bali), Moscow, Mumbai (Bombay), and Karachi; Jakarta, Casablanca, Delhi, and Islamabad; Riyadh, Mombassa, Kabul, Istanbul, and Nairobi.
Nor should we forget the leveling of Groznyy by the Russians in 1996; the siege of Sarajevo and Mostar in the Balkan wars of the early 1990s; the LA riots of 1992; the US’s bloody incursion into Mogadishu in 1993; the continuing sucide bombing in Israel bars, buses, and malls; Israel’s bulldozing of Jenin and Nablus in spring 2002 and its continuing policies of strangulation, immiseration, and demolition against Palestinian cities;
Both cities and organized violence are “rescaling” together as they are remade through transnational connections, technologies, diasporas, and flows, which tend to transcend and undermine the (always fleeting and violently enforced) stability of Cold War blocs or modern nation-states (Daldy, 2000; Giddens, 1985b).
p.5
For these, too, are unleashing powerful processes of “creative destruction” which tend to intensify the roles of strategic, subnational spaces and city regions in economic governance and social spaces and city regions in economic governance and social, cultural, and political change (Brenner and Theodore, 2002).
Far from going away, then, strategies of deliberately attacking the systems and places that support civilian urban life have only become more sophisticated since the mass, total, urban annihilation that characterized the twentieth century.
p.6
Cities are often located on the fault-lines between cultures- between modernizing societies and traditional cultures; between individual-based and community based economies; between democracy and more authoritarian regimes; between colonial governments and native populations
Bollens, 2001: 179
Appadurai helps us understand why contempry warfare and terror now largely boil down over the spaces, symbols, meaning, support systems, or power structures of cities and urban places. As throughout the history of war, such struggles are fueled by dichotomized constructions of “us” and an “othered” them – the target…the enemy…the hated. “War…mobilizes the highly charged and dangerous dialectic of place attachment,” writes Ken Hewitt. This involves “the perceived antithesis of ‘our’ places or homeland and ‘theirs’, an unbridled sentimentalizing of one’s own while dehumanizing the enemy’s people and land (1983: 258)
p.8
In attempting to split an intrinsically mobile, heterogenous,, and urbanizing world into jigsaw-like pieces of territory- which are assumed to have essential and “pure” identities- such views fundamentally and violently challenge the reality of cities and urban life on oour planet (Laguerre, 2003). As throughout urban history, in these times of intensifying globalization urban areas are crucial enters of heterogeneous mixing. Increasingly, the differences, tolerances, and hatreds of the globe are inseparably related to, and constituted through, day-to-day encounters, and cosmopolitan accommodations (and frictions) in the streetscaoes, schools, city halls, and neighborhoods of cities.
On the other hand, Bush’s neoconservative and neo-imperial “was on terror” also problematizes such urban cosmopolitanism. It, too, undermines both the possibility and the legitimacy of city-based democratic pluralism and dissent against the “new global order”. In asserting a binaried split between “the civilized and savage throughout the social circuitry,” the war on terror rhetoric of the Bush regime, and the policies based on it have produces a “constant scrutiny of those who bear the sign of ‘dormant’ terrorist.”. It has also “activated a policing points of vulnerability against an enemy who inheres within the space of the US” (Passavant and Dean, 2002; cited in Geogory, 2003).
p.9-10
The “hybrid”, transnational identities of many neighborhoods and communities in cities, shaped by generations of transnational migration and diasporic mixing, are thus becoming problematized. Inevitably, such places and groups are being “stretched” across the resurgent “them and us” or “home and foreign” binaries that are being imposed. Many people, spaces, and communities in Western cities are thus becoming “othered” simply because they are perceived to be associated with ‘Arab’ or Muslim terrorist’” (Hall, 2003).
p.11
As globe-spanning, geostrategic concerns blur into local, urban spaces, all of a sudden it seems normal for Western cities to face a palpable militarization previously more common in cities of the global South. Tanks protect airports. Troops guard rail stations. Surface-to-air missiles sit around office block housing meeting of international leaders. Combat air patrol buzz around Manhattan and London. New York street police now carry pocketsize radiation detectors in the hope that they might detect any nuclear “dirty bombs” smuggled into the metropolitan area. Us postal sorting depots now have automatic anthrax sniffers. New York’s Grand Central Station now has automatic bio-weapons detectors. And in a curious replay of earlier debates about strategic bombing and nuclear war, some commentators in the United States have even argued that the risk of terrorism – and particularly the risk that such attacks will utilize nuclear, chemical, and biological “Weapon of Mass Destruction” – mean that large, central cities should be actively decentralized (Swanstrom, 2002; see Glaeser and Shapiro,2002; Coaffee, 2003b)
p.12
In this ‘state of emergency” the normal rules of civilian, democratic law are being supplanted or replaced (Agamben, 1998, 2002). In their place come emergency, eecutive powers, and covert state actions which are justified – when discussed at all – because of the “temporary” imperatives of “national security,” the post-9/11 “crisis,” or the demands of a globe-spanning “war on terror”. At the same time, the laws of war are being reshaped to accommodate routine, state-backed, high-tech violence against cities and essential urban infrastructures (Smith, 2002, Naumann, 2003).
p.13-14
Thus, a global vicious circle is now established along the lines so familiar in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. State-backed terror, atrocity, and crimes against humanity breed informal terrorist atrocity and crimes against humanity. States respond with more of the same while invoking states of emergency and cultures of fear. These, in turn, allow legal restraints to be dispensed with more state-backed terror. Such state violence goes on the deepen resentment, recruit more volunteers, and exacerbate the intransigence, or ethic of martyrdom, that sustains the growing ranks of willing suicide bombers (Hage, 2003)
p.14
Crucially, from thje point of view of this book, such constructions of states of emergency and fear are changing the very tenor of urban culture and society (Molotch and McClain, 2003). Many urban societies which are already experiencing widespread fragmentation forressing are seeing these processes amplified further as people seek to “capsularize” themselves away from people, experiences, and spaces that they perceive as risky, vulnerable, or unpredictable (De Cauter, 2004; Graham and Marvin, 2001, Ellin, 1997; Gold and Revill, 2000)
p.16
Such strategies will not completely undermine the role of cities as dense sites of heterogeneous, unpredictable mixing. Cities are far too complex, porous, ans multi-dimensional to be somehow “programmed” by computers and surveillance systems (Graham and Marvin, 2001).
p.16
The current state of emergency is combining with preexisting processes of urban militarization. As part of the growth of neoliberal policy, many states have been militarizing their systems of criminal justice, law enforcement, and public space regulation, bringing the weapons, doctrines, and technologies of war to the streets of cities and the borders of nation (Nunn, 2001; Kraska, 2001; Garland, 2001; Young, 1999).
p.17
Instead of the “military-industrial complex”, Pieterse talks of an emerging “criminal-industrial complex” or “security-industrial complex,” which straddles home-domestic and international-foreign scales (Pieterse, 2002:3)
p.17
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