Last week I took part in an extremely interesting workshop at the British Library. Citizenship Without Community was hosted by the Open University in collaboration with the BISA poststructural politics working group. The workshop examined ideas concering citizenship, begining with thoughts from Engin Isin (The Open University) and closing with a paper by Étienne Balibar (University of California, Irvine. In between there were a number of thoughful contributions on the nature of contemrpoary citizenship from Vicki Squire (Open University), Angharad Closs Stephens (Durham University), Joe Painter (Durham University), Jonna Pettersson (Lund University), Andrew Schapp (Exeter University), Cindy Weber (Lancaster University), Rutvica Andrijasevic (Open University), Claudia Aradau (Open University), Umut Erel (Open University), and Jef Huysmans (Open University).
For those who weren’t able to be at the workshop podcasts of all of the day’s contributions are now online along with photos of the event. You can find them here.
Bangkok: the future of urban war
Thursday, May 20th, 2010Watching Bangkok burn 1 over the last few days has been both disturbing and upsetting. The use of heavy armour against a predominantly civilian protest movement (segments of which have latterly turned to small arms and improvised weapons in its stand off with the government) has been a timely reminder of the forms of violence that could mark our urban future. In some ways it has exemplified dynamics already identified in the literature on urban warfare. The cycle of occupation, displacement and reoccupation that the army and redshirts have been engaged in looks a lot like the ‘pop-up armies and spatial chess‘ that Robert Warren detailed in 2002. (more…)
Tags: Bangkok, political violence, redshirts, urban warfare, urbanisation of security
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