photo credit: Joseph G. Ajila Pinzón

Recently I finally found time to play my way through the single-player campaign of Modern Warfare 3 (MW3). As those who follow me on twitter know, I had been anticipating MW3 for a while now. Throughout the lead-in to the game’s release we had been treated to epic trailers showing the destruction of cities such as New York and Paris.

Given that I am currently trying to write about visions of urban cataclysm, playing my way through an interactive – if not immersive – rendering of such visions of urban violence had been on my to-do list for a while.

MW3 – at least in its campaign incarnation – is a strangely disappointing experience. It’s true that you watch as the Eiffel tower gets knocked down by an airstrike [ffwd to 17:45 in linked video] , but otherwise, the game is something of a heads-down run through a series of firefights where volume and intensity of fire replace any pretence at stealth or precision. Given that the original Modern Warfare is primary remembered for ‘All Ghillied Up’ which required the player to navigate the abandoned wreck of the city of Prypiat with care and stealth, this substitution of blind-fire is somewhat strange. Moreover, it has the odd effect of stopping the player from appreciating the levels of detail achieved in the rendering of cities such as New York or, later in the campaign, Berlin. Since players must essentially charge through the rubblescapes firing randomly at barely discernible targets, any appreciation of their environment is lost. This has been a feature of recent First Person Shooters (FPS) with a reviewer of last year’s Medal of Honour noting something similar.

['All Ghillied Up']
Of course, readers may at this point note one/both of two things: a) this probably echoes the mayhem of war – soldiers do not go to war to go sight seeing; and b) it’s just a game…

Now of course b) is an entirely problematic answer: while I have little time for interminable debates about video games and violence, MW3 is not just a game. It is a cultural event that should be examined for what it tells us about the regimes of representation and affect that characterise the culture it derives from and has so much influence on. Like all cultural artefacts MW3 tells us things about how we see the world and interact with it. Which brings me to objection a): of course this is right in one sense – but MW3 was never supposed to ‘recreate war’. If you wanted to do that you’d need to introduce pain to the experience. Anyone claiming to understand the chaos of war from MW3 needs to seriously think through what they are saying. Of course, it is possible that this kind of visual and somatic chaos does privilege activity over reflection (As Roger Stahl has noted). This may desensitise us to the violence of the war on terror, for example, by foreclosing our more reflective nature. But MW3 does not tell us what it is like to be in Helmand or Basra or Fallujah.

So how to make sense of the disappointment? Well, I would draw a parallel with something else that happened this week. In the AFPAK theatre a NATO airstrike killed up to 28 Pakistani border personnel. This has had serious repercussions with Pakistan seeing the strike as a violation of sovereignty and a breach the understandings that allow US and NATO operations against Taliban fighters in the contested terrain of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. Pakistan has responded by ejecting the US from an airbase used to launch drones.

The strike on the Pakistan border exposes very clearly the fallacy of the supposed precision targeting of the war on terror. The idea of precision is a product of 2 dynamics: on the one hand the development of sophisticated information technology systems that render battlespace in real time, thus giving the impression that targets can be hit with accuracy; and on the other hand the representation of warfighting through footage of ‘successful’ drone strikes on clearly identifiable targets. The latter representations frame civilian understandings of warfighting giving the impression that improved IT has led to an accurate, precise warfighting. However, the loss of Pakistani border personnel shows us that such precision is a fiction born of cultural expectation (surely machines don’t get things wrong) and representation (we have been shown precise strikes, so all of them must be like this).

Of course, the exposure of the fiction of precision has been underway for a while now – at least since the US dropped bombs on Afghan wedding parties. As such, we have been retreating from the fiction of precision for a while now: understanding, if only tacitly, that war is not precise. I would say that MW3 mirrors this retreat from precision well. There is little that is careful or deliberate about any of the single player campaign in MW3 – even the sniping scenes end in outlandish explosions. And whether we have time to examine the landscape is neither here nor there if all we trying to achieve is ‘good effect on target’.

I am not suggesting some sort of conspiracy by game designers to desensitise us to a lack of precision. That would be a long way from the truth. But I am suggesting that we should look at cultural artefacts such as MW3 and ask whether they play a role in both reflecting and influencing a culture that has been retreating from precision in its overseas campaigns for nearly 10 years. The question, of course, is what can be done about the retreat from precision given the impunity with which drone strikes are proceeding.

photo credit: Tracy O

In a perceptive comment on the LSE-Saif Gaddafi affair, Richard Sennett notes that LSE director Howard Davies “didn’t create the problem of the dodgy donor – he succumbed to a structural danger that is built into the [UK] educational system.” To outsiders the LSE’s decsision to supervise Gaddifi’s PhD and take donations from funds he controls could appear either naive, underhand or worse. However, Sennett raises an important point that bears further consideration as it implies that we should expect more of these problematic funding arrangements in UK Higher Education in future.

Consider the following:

1. Universities are expected to both teach more students and produce world class research while having their government funding cut.

2. University degrees are treated as a private good that prepare students for the employment market. Hence, universities are told told be more engaged with the needs of private business.

3. University research is to to be increasingly judged on the basis of ‘impact’ – how it translates into public activity, particularly how it it is taken up and used by private and public bodies.

Successive governments have encouraged universities to cope with these constraints by doing the following:

1. Accepting increasing numbers of premium-fee paying foreign (non-UK/non-EU) students.

2. Seeking funds from private donors and alumni (along the lines of the endowments that sustain universities in the US)

3. Selling their expertise to private and  public bodies to ensure that it is not locked away in the academy (and that researchers can demonstrate ‘impact’).

Under those circumstances is it any surprise that a UK Higher Education institution accepted a foreign, premium fee student for a 3 year course and then accepted his alumni contribution to the continued running of the institution? Moreover, when experts in democratic transition were invited to advise a country that is surely in need of such a political transformation, is it any surprise they took the opportunity? Of course you could argue that they should have resisted such temptation and made a principled stand. And yet if institutions are being encouraged to balance their tricky funding equations by behaving more like private sector businesses it is competition, not principles, that they are being urged to accept as their guiding motive.

Why is it important to bear these factors in mind? Overall it is successive governments that have established this structural framework. And let us not forget that, in the UK at least, governments are elected and thus have the support of the electorate. Even in a situation where parties cannot secure the support of a majority of the population - as is the case with the current ruling coalition – a sizeable part of the electorate is responsible for the subsequent policies they implement.

So far from being a story of individual failings, the LSE-Saif Gaddafi story is one in which successive governments and electorates are embroiled. It is worth bearing this context in mind before leaping to rash conclusions. Moreover, if we don’t want to repeat stories such as the LSE-Saif Gaddafi affair then perhaps we – as a society - need to reverse the current direction of travel of UK Higher Education policy. If you want a principled higher education system then you need to recognise the public good it provides and match it with adequate funding, thus removing the market incentives that encourage exploitation of resources despite the ethical implications.

photo credit: Pedro Moura Pinheiro

Reflections on the future of social science in UK universities

I don’t usually comment on UK politics at martincoward.net. This is largely because I want the content on this site to reflect my particular research interests and activity. My expertise lies in the intersection of political philosophy and international politics. More specifically, my interests are in thinking about the inter-related topics of cities, security and political violence. I have therefore, largely confined myself to comments on these issues. However, as a politics scholar at a UK Higher Education (UKHE) institution, the nature and future of social sciences in UK universities is something I am both interested and invested in.

Last week’s Browne Review of Higher Education and tomorrow’s Spending Review (SR), will have significant consequences for social science in UKHE. While Browne proposes allowing universities to charge as much as they like for degree courses, the SR is rumoured to eliminate a substantial amount (if not all) of public funding for research and teaching in arts, humanities and social science in UK universities. For social scientists as well as their potential students (and their parents), these proposals have the potential to distort the balance of teaching and research in universities, restrict access to degree courses, hinder the international competitiveness of research  and, ultimately, recast the relationship between universities and wider UK society. As someone with both an individual stake and a professional interest in how these changes will unfold, it would seem appropriate to offer a few reflections.

Support for the principles of the Browne review reveals a belief that education beyond the age of 18 is a private, not a public good.¹ Those who argue for increased contributions by individual students regard enquiry into, and propagation of, knowledge beyond basic competence as a private matter that individuals would only undertake if it gave them some sort of benefit.² Supporters of the idea of increased individual contributions see enquiry into arts, humanities and social science subjects such as English Literature, Anthropology and Politics as unnecessary unless it can confer competitive advantage onto an individual in the job market. And if it can do so the individual, not society, should pay. In espousing this notion of training (this is not a vision of education) Browne and his supporters demonstrate a very poor understanding of the nature of higher education.

The question is, therefore, what is the nature of social science degrees in UKHE? For the most part pre-university schooling emphasises instrumental, goal oriented tasks. As such many students lack a strong grasp of what it means to conduct independent enquiry. Put another way – in the language that employers might understand – they lack a firm grasp of what it means to exercise initiative as opposed to following guidance. University exposes these students to a structured learning environment in which they are challenged to acquire the critical thinking skills that will enable them to exercise independent judgement. My role is to support them in acquiring those skills – which by definition must be independently achieved – through structured courses, environments and exchanges. Their final degree classification (a system which could be reformed, by the way) reflects the extent to which they have utilised our support and gained an independent grasp of how to find, order, understand and critically evaluate knowledge (n my case, knowledge of politics in a variety of forms). In addition it reflects the extent to which they can communicate that knowledge verbally and in writing.

That’s what we do: build the ability to locate, understand, evaluate, organise, structure, present and communicate knowledge in an independent fashion. That’s why our graduates are employable – they are flexible, adaptable, able to take initiative, reflect and communicate.  If society can only see this as a private good, it is short-sighted. Their presence in society means that the UK is a better place and that the public and private sector organisations that employ our graduates are better able to adapt to the challenges they encounter.

As an aside, I would venture that this failure to conceive of the education of social science graduates as a public good could be linked to a perceived lack of interest in independent judgement across wider UK society. This might help to explain why organisations such as Migration Watch are able to publish flawed statistics in order to support their exclusionary stance towards immigration. Or indeed, why the present government managed to misrepresent crime statistics when in opposition (or indeed how it has managed to perpetuate the myth that welfare spending ballooned under labour). Were the general population more concerned with understanding the manner in which knowledge is represented and communicated, it might reject such flimsy misrepresentations. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that Browne’s idea of education as a private good has not been met with the widespread incredulity it deserves.

What will happen, then to social sciences in UKHE? And how might universities respond?

In the first place, I think it is worth pointing out that cabinet millionaires probably don’t care either way what what happens. Increases in fees for their children are small change however steep they are. It is also worth noting that there is a real danger that UKHE will return to being the elite institution it was for much of the twentieth century. Stripped of state support for social science teaching, many universities will set fees at a level that will deter those who might not traditionally go to university. Ultimately, only the wealthy will be able to dig their children out of the debt-trap of university fees. The middle classes will, of course, continue to see the benefit of going to university but the debt their children will accumulate is likely to seriously dent any increase in earning they might have expected to see.³ As such they are likely to consume less and afford smaller houses. The ripples could be significant. But the headline is that fees are more than likely to entrench the boundaries to social mobility that keep children who would not traditionally go to university – children from economically deprived areas – out of the UKHE system.

This, however, is unlikely to be the end of the effects of fees. The following are also very possible as a consequence of removing a cap on fees income:

• Privatisation: Browne (and Cable’s) vision is of a market in which the provider sets the price, but the government actually hands out the money. Moreover, in return for this distorted vision of a market, providers are supposed to submit to a super-quango that will regulate all areas of their activity. It is difficult to imagine any private sector company operating under these conditions. It will not take long before universities in a strong financial position realise this and make moves to become private entities. Once they do they will control their income stream and they will be exempt from overbearing regulation. We can only hope they chose to be not-for-profit organisations. Needless to say, privatisation will break up the idea of a university system in which institutions enjoy a certain parity of conditions.
• Wage inflation: On the one hand, graduates saddled with mountainous debt will demand higher salaries. If they have to take on the costs of their education, they will make employers pay in return. Similarly, if universities seek to capitalise on the public profiles of their researchers to attract paying customers they will have to pay for that talent. At a time when universities are seeking to end the implicit bargain that saw researchers who could earn more in the private sector accept lower salaries in return for decent final pensions, this could lead to wage inflation. Universities will not want to see good researchers and teachers leaving because pay (immediate or deferred) cannot compete with private sector employment (or indeed with competitor institutions). Universities will be in no position to drive their most talented staff – the very staff that will help them recruit customers – away.
• The end of social bargains: There is an implicit bargain that gives both government and the private sector access to university graduates and research for very little in return. Academics frequently offer their services for free: charging no consultancy fees and receiving only travel expenses in return. This bargain will end. Government can expect to see universities charge commercial consultancy rates for the services they provide. Similarly, ideas such as open access publishing may die. Similarly, employers recruit graduates without paying any sort of premium beyond corporation tax. While universities will want their graduates to be employed, they will also want a greater income from the very people that benefit from those graduates.
• The emergence of entrepreneurial leaders: At present Vice Chancellors (VCs) are, for the most part, academics who have chosen administrative roles over research roles. On the whole they do a good job because they understand the nature of academia. But markets and privatisation will require VCs to become entrepreneurs. They will need to have commercial sensibilities. This will not be about managing budgets made of of bloc grants, but rather nurturing talent, growing income streams and diversifying portfolios. Once entrepreneurial managers move in (with the inflated wages common to the private sector), who knows where institutions will go. While I have no particular love for VCs (most of them have lacked the courage to control the growing administrative strata in HE institutions and have thus failed to keep research and teaching staff focused solely on these tasks), the loss of academic managers in HE would be as significant as the loss of clinician managers in the NHS.
• Loss of international competitiveness in research: At present the UK social science research base is broad and diverse because all institutions stand to benefit by engaging in research. However, many institutions will see teaching as a more reliable – and bigger – source of income post-Browne. As such they will not consider research vital. A two-tier workforce of teachers and researchers will emerge. As such social science research will be consolidated in a smaller number of universities. UK social science will be narrower and poorer for this consolidation.

I have mixed feelings about how this will unfold. I suspect that in 10 years time UK social science will be a much narrower field, research output will have declined, institutions will have closed and social mobility will have been reduced. I hope that universities find a way to become not-for-profit entities that can escape the shackles of overbearing government regulation, protect the balance between teaching and research, and yet at the same ensure sufficient income is invested in bursaries for those who might be deterred from attending university by cost considerations. I am not optimistic, however. What is certain, however, is that if those who seek to destroy the idea of education as a private good – the ConDem small-state ideologues – get their way, they will pay for it.

At the heart of this failure of infrastructure lies two important contributory factors. On the one hand car traffic in China is rapidly expanding. As urbanisation gives rise to grater wealth as well as greater distances to travel, car culture is taking hold as it has done across the urbanised global north. In 2009 13.6 million vehicles were sold in China, leading China to surpass the US in car sales. As volume of traffic rises, infrastructure cannot cope and jams become more commonplace. This is a familiar story in  urbanising zones of the global south such as Lagos and Sao Paulo.

The Guardian points, however, to another contributory factor – namely the transport along China’s road’s of coal mined from newly found deposits. Heavy traffic and inadequate infrastructure lead to repairs which themselves gave rise to jams.  The bigger picture here is the co-dependent relationship between urbanisation and fossil fuels. This is a question that the global north has failed to properly address, perpetuating car cultures that demand oil². Conceptually, this raises the question of the type of fossil-infrastructure hybrid that forms the material substrate of contemporary urban subjectivity.

Overall then, this traffic jam both offers insight into the ‘complex ecology of political subjectivity’³ characteristic of cities as well as posing urgent questions about how we might achieve sustainable global urbanisation.

What is at the heart of this motif? As David Harvey noted, one of the important things underlying the idea of networking is time-space compression – the reduction of perceptions of spatio-temporal distance between places and people by improvements in transport or technology such that otherwise distant points feel bound together. But something else is, I think at the heart of the idea of the network: relationships and exposure. The interconnections made possible by time-space compression foster relationships between places and people that might otherwise have been rendered weak by distance. More importantly, they render possible all sorts of projection across space and time that means people can send ideas and communications to those they might not otherwise know. And such a sending necessarily exposes the sender to the possibility of misunderstanding and/or rejection. Of course, the hope – at the heart of the social network – is that strong relationships of time/space and exposure will coincide in a good way: that we will send communications to unknown others and, felicitously, forge authentic relationships as a consequence.

But this brings me to the second thing I find interesting – facebook captures the duality of community in modern politics. On the one hand it is home to plenty of groups of people who profess some sort of common identity. These ‘communities’ recreate the same sort of inclusionary dynamic found in modern political community. They seek to be a group defined by some sort of common property or project. But there is also another kind of communit at work here – the community of those who, as Alphonso Lingis once said, have nothing in common. In the networked world one cannot – without rejecting the motif that makes sense of the world for most people (and thus making it hard for you to find common conceptual ground on which to have a conversation about the world) – refuse interconnection. It is not possible to refuse a potential relationship. That is, we are all exposed in some way. From the call centre worker taking calls from unknown customers to the academic with publicly advertised email addresses to the adverts piped in unwanted by Google AdSense to each webpage you view, there a myriad ways that we are exposed to communications we may not have solicited, each seeking an interconnection in some way. Of course, one can try to limit these interconnections, but there is always that chance that someone not the same as us tries to connect with us. As such then, the social network shows very well how communities of commonality are always – in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy – unworked: picked away at by attempts by those who are not the same as us to connect, connections that would show the artificial notion of ideas of commonality (i.e., that such closed communities rest on constructing a sense of sameness and keeping otherness out).

Thirdly, social networks rely on real infrastructure. The concentration on social relationships is a classic case of anthropocentrism. While we concentrate on the way that social networks make human relationships possible, we forget that the people engaged in these relationship are cyborgs: assemblages of machine and flesh. Without keyboards, webcams, fibre optics, routers and so on I, you or we would not be what we are. As such then concentrating on social relationships has the effect of masking the way that the very nature of human subjectivity has been changed by networked technologies.

And finally, there is a very pronounced politics to infrastructure. Although there are more internet users in the developing world than in the developed world, this tells us nothing about the actual penetration of internet infrastructure in the developing world (rather it tells us that there the population of the developing world is bigger than that of the developed world – hardly an amazing fact). If one turns to the geography of users of facebook (and other social networks), one begins to see the pattern of internet penetration. And most notably, one finds that Africa is the most common cold spot when it comes to both social networking and internet penetration. As such then the networking characteristic of global life is as uneven as the political economy that also defines our time. It is worth remembering then that while the network may be a powerful motif for understanding and envisioning the contemporary period, we should not lose sight of the geopolitics of infrastructure evident in its uneven distribution.

Other reports (here and here) refer to the demolition as part of a long standing question of land ownership and the administrative destruction of structures deemed illegal. The Bedouin are represented as having temporarily occupied state land, while the authorities are represented as removing this temporary occupation in order to prevent the Bedouin acquiring rights to land that the state regards as its own. Passing over the fascinating question of the disjuncture between urbanised and nomadic societies, this is a prime illustration of the manner in which Israel has asserted territorial control through planning law.

As Weizman and Segal as well as B’Tselem have noted, the state of Israel has planning laws that prevent those that it regards as other (primarily Palestinians) from building and thus asserting a fixed relation to territory. B’Tselem has catalogued a vast number of house demolitions that have occurred for ‘administrative reasons’ – effectively a lack of planning permission. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions report No Place Like Home outlines how difficult it is for Palestinians to obtain such permission. Under such circumstances Palestinian buildings are precarious, perpetually exposed to demolition for lack of permission. Interestingly, this hides the politics of building away in planning regulations. As such the state of Israel can present demolitions as simple rule-following and argue that Palestinians unfortunate enough to have their homes demolished are in that position because they did not follow the rules (and that this violence would not have occurred if they had). This masks the manner in which the rules themselves codify an attempt to prevent Palestinians establishing a relationship – via building homes – between identity and territory. It is for this reason that in my book Urbicide I referred to Israeli house demolitions in the same terms that I referred to the Bosnian-Serb siege of Sarajevo. Moreover, it is a classic example of the reasons why we should be cautious of claims that the law is a simple instrument above/beyond politics. The case of Israeli lawfare shows precisely how the law is always political and claims framed in legal terms must be seen as such.

There is much to be said about the release of what is being referred to as the Kabul/Afghan War Diary or Afghanistan War Logs. Originally delivered to Wikileaks and simultaneously published by The Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel.

The logs are a vast resource for those seeking to track the conduct of operations in Afghanistan. Of most concern will be those individual reports that could be interpreted as offering evidence of violations of the laws of war. Many activists have been seeking a smoking gun to confirm their allegations of the unlawful conduct of this conflict and no doubt there will be claims that they have found it in these documents. Of particular interest will be the activities of special forces in Afghanistan, whose activities have been opaque – and thus sometimes of concern – to observers.  The Guardian hints that reports concerning the activities of Task Force 373 raise concerns such as the use of extrajudicial killing and detention without trial.

For my part I am unlikely to have the time to do anything other than surf the tip of the database presented in the papers (which itself is only part of the leaked material). This is, of course, one of the problems of the information age. Noted by Jean-Francois Lyotard back in 1979, the era of the internet has given rise to vast databases that contain more information that can be sensibly comprehended. Faced with this problem we give responsibility to search algorithms that can pull some information out of the data, but only according to pre-established rules. And, as such, we do not get to the information in itself, but merely how it answers the questions we ask. It is hard, therefore, to get an overview that might give rise to a narrative that contradicts our already existing understandings of the conflict. As such then, this data is only as good as the questions we ask. If we ask the data to confirm an existing narrative, there is a good chance we will find some evidence of interest.  Overall, then, it is interesting how the leaks have not been interpreted – by The Guardian, New York Times and Der Spiegel – to say anything very surprising. Attentive observers of the war would know the general drift of the assertions that have been printed so far. Perhaps the problem is that, as Adam Weinstein noted, what the documents do provide is details. What we find then is a tension between grand narratives (which, according to Lyotard are a thing of the past) and details. The problem for me is that we tend to be obsessed by the details to the detriment of the wider narrative. To put it another way: while it is important to bring individuals to justice for specific episodes, we must not lose sight of the bigger context that gave rise to these episodes in the first place. To fail to understand this would be akin to policing individual crimes without pausing to ask how crime itself might be tackled.

That said, the leak  is evidence of a very interesting trend in our contemporary relation to war – namely the extension of what is being called ‘battlespace’ to encompass the media. War is fought out on the internet, TV and in newspapers. This is not simply a case of activists using these channels for critique. Rather the very struggle for legitimacy of combat operations occurs in these venues. As such the leaks are a direct contribution to the extension of battlespace. Undoubtedly for many this will be a good thing. But it poses the question as to how battlespaces will be rolled back and how daily life will be reinvented in non-martial/non-conflictual terms. Or perhaps it poses the question of how we will escape a seemingly permanent state of war that has enveloped – albeit in a far less violent way than it has destroyed the lives of Afghans and Iraqis – almost all the arenas in which we live our lives.

Update 03.08.10

Two stories that have appeared on this topic are worth noting for the way that they capture opposing poles of the spectrum of opinion regarding the war logs. Bubble Boys from the Columbia Journalism Review (thanks to David Campbell for this via twitter) makes the case for seeing the mass of detail released in these leaks as politically significant. For the CJR the pronouncement by informed observers that there is nothing new in the leaks is considered problematic because it gives the impression that they do not demand our attention in the way that new material might. I’m not convinced by the argument that this mass of detail provides a tool for keeping the war in people’s minds – especially as the one case the CJR talks about is one in which details have been narrativised for readers – thus stressing the notion that detail itself is not politically significant, rather is it the way in which stories or ‘[v]ignettes…help readers navigate that “fog of war”’. That said, it is a cogent argument against the informed few declaring the leaks to be nothing new. On the other hand Michael Barthel at Salon wrote a good piece indicating why it is hard for masses of detail to gain political traction. I find this a more compelling argument – and a good explanation for why, despite CJR’s protestations, there has been an underwhelming response to these leaks.

Those who hold the city as a kind of normative ideal often view the principle armed threat to urban life to come from rural dwellers. The countryside, it is thought, is mired in ignorance and a resentment of the cosmopolitan modernity of the city. These kinds of thoughts were regularly aired in relation to the destruction of Bosnian towns and cities, carefully misunderstanding that the men behind the guns were often urbanites. The Bangkok violence has shown us something else regarding the urban-rural dynamic. Far from seeking to destroy the city, protesters – whose power base is often said to lie in the more rural north of the country – have seen the city as both a space in which to elaborate political aspirations and a resource with which to level the asymmetry that exists between civilian political groups and armed, militarised governments. As such they have not attempted to destroy the city, but rather have seen it as  a place and resource in and through which to enunciate a distinctive politics. This is a dynamic that will be common in the urban millennium. Far from wanting to kill the city, rural dwellers are moving to the city in greater numbers. It is the terrain and resource that they will draw upon – not destroy – in elaborating novel politics. As such then, far from seeking to destroy the city the redshirts were an example of an urbanised politics.

Ranged against such political movements are the forces of the state. Through representations in the news media and popular culture, we are accustomed to thinking of urban warfare as a high-tech form of violence, fought with drones and robots by small, mobile teams. But Bangkok shows us a very different face of urban warfare: small arms and light armour used as a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The urban terrain blunts the manoeuvrability and effectiveness of armed forces. Armour and heavy weapons do not have the agility to engage with anything other than straightforward head-on force in the urban environment. More importantly, tanks and heavy weapons cannot stand off at the range they would like in order to achieve effective targeting. Given such constraints the force wielded by the state becomes blunted by an environment that all but prevents agility and precision. Bangkok shows us that while we talk of various complex technological assemblages for surveying and decomposing the urban environment, the most obvious way for the state to deal with urban threats is through the establishment of free fire zones and the deployment of overwhelming force.

Overall, then Bangkok has been both instructive and sobering. On the one hand it confirms the manner in which conflict is increasingly urbanised in the contemporary period. On the other, however, it shows us a face of war that is horrifyingly blunt and violent. I suspect that, faced with enemies exploiting the levelling characteristics of urban terrain, governments will increasingly resort to the kind of brute force witnessed in Thailand.

In the midst of the coverage one story in The Guardian struck me as particularly noteworthy: Flight ban could leave UK short of fruit and veg.¹ Noting that

Britain’s supermarkets could soon run short of perishable goods…as the ongoing ban on UK air travel brought Britain’s largest perishable air freight handling centre to a standstill today.

The story goes on – despite protestations to the contrary from the firms interviewed – that

Customers…will begin to run out of their existing supplies. Many of Britain’s supermarkets operate their supply chains incredibly tightly, using the principle of “just in time” delivery. When disaster strikes, shortages of some items can start appearing within a few days.

The story neatly ties together the constitutivity of networked infrastructure to metropolitan life and the apocalyptic imaginary that besets that form of life. Dependent on the logistics supplied by networks such as air freight, metropolitan life is forever imagining what a systemic collapse might look like.

NB: This video has graphic images of killing. Viewers should exercise discretion. You Tube recommends that the video is not viewed by anyone under the age of 18.

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks and so have not been able to respond to the wikileaks ‘Collateral murder‘ video.¹ Like many others I was initially struck by the way the video exemplifies the contemporary intersection of video-gaming, spectacle and warfare. Indeed, the  uncanny resonance of the footage with the ‘Death from above’ mission in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare seem to invite the viewer to draw uncomfortable parallels.

However, my colleague Kyle Grayson has an excellent commentary on ‘Collateral Murder’ that raises some other points that prompted me to think further about what this footage might tell us about the contemporary intersection of war and society.

Kyle’s point – that Rules of Engagement (ROEs) and laws of war are ways of legitimating, not proscribing, the killing of civilians under certain circumstances is an important one. The point about ROEs or laws of war is that they accept – very openly – that civilians will be killed in war. These rules/laws are ways of legitimating that killing under rubrics of proportionality – specifically, that if the risk of killing civilians or damaging their property is less than the military importance of the objective that this targeting/activity can achieve then that death or damage is perceived to be legitimate. It takes little imagination to see that a fair amount of ‘collateral damage’ will be legitimate according to these rules/laws of war. Indeed, Martin Shaw has argued that the legitimation of collateral damage under rules/laws of proportionality, could be said to give rise to a form of war in which the massacre of civilians is an integral part – lamented, of course, but legitimated by the ROEs.

Kyle also makes the important point that focusing on the ROEs means that the focus is on how we fight rather than why we fight. I think this is an important point and Kyle is right to link that to an assemblage of political tactics that successfully depoliticises warfare by maintaining this focus on how, rather than why, we fight. Kyle shows how opponents of war who focus on ROEs (or on the way in which a war is fought) are failing to shift the spotlight onto the really important question: why we are engaged in war at all. Holding militaries to account for violations of ROEs/laws of war – while necessary – is, on its own, a very blunted form of oposition.

I would make several further observations along this line:

1. The first is that on the whole, focusing on the legality of actions in war fails to comprehend what ROEs and laws of war are for. We should not, of course, diminish the importance of ROEs/laws of war for curbing the excesses of organised force (indeed, laws surrounding the legitimate use of armed force have been vital in holding perpetrators of appalling crimes in places as diverse as Abu Ghraib  and Bosnia to account). That said, ROEs/laws of war do not proscribe war, they legitimate it. These laws evolve over time to ensure that war can be fought within the normative horizons of contemporary society. As such the laws exist in order to make it possible for force to be applied by militaries in ways that society will not find abhorrent. Asking militaries to abide by ROEs/laws of war is thus not a mechanism for contesting war. Indeed, it is an acceptance of war – albeit within bounds set by societal norms. As of the present time although aggression was prosecuted at Nuremberg, no legal proscription applies to war per se.
2. Given this, it seems odd that so much of recent anti-war discourse has revolved around applying law to war. The militaries of advanced industrial states are well versed in applying that law and are happy to utilise it to justify targeting and other actions. Violations are treated as aberrations (just as crime is treated as a break from the social norm, and thus unrelated to society’s dynamics). Moreover, much of the legal precedent being invoked (such as the prosecution of aggression at Nuremberg) applies to a system of states predicated on interstate violence. Putting aside for a moment the problem of equating contemporary military action and that of the Axis powers in World War 2, this means that anti-war discourses invoking such laws are tacitly arguing for the acceptance of an inter-state system in which violence is treated as endemic, albeit limited by legal frameworks. It might be better to invoke values that undermine the very idea of the state, its supposed monopoly on force and the territoriality that gives rise to its bellicosity.
3. There is a further problem with the application of law to warfare in this way: it is evidence of the manner in which warfare in the contemporary era is becoming normalised as an everyday occurrence. Just as western societies have increasingly turned to law to regulate everyday politics, now they turn to law to regulate war. I don’t doubt that war is slowly suffusing everyday life. Indeed, I have argued that this is leading to an urbanisation of security. However, I see no reason to play a role in the further normalisation of the idea that war is an everyday activity.
4. This raises the question of the nature of war. If it is exceptional, not normal, how are we to treat it, to contest it. Here, I have to say I disagree slightly with Kyle. I don’t accept that one can simply assume that war should be simply treated as aberrant. This is a common trope in contestations of organised force. However, it seems to me this misses the complex and mutually constitutive imbrication of war and society. This is an imbrication noted, of course, by Foucault in his lectures collected and published in English as Society must be Defended. This is of course difficult terrain. The last thing I would want to do is valorise war. However, it seems necessary to note that organised force is integral to modern society. Simply arguing for the end of war fails to note this imbrication. To follow Foucault, contesting and ending war would require a radical reworking of social relations in order  to undo that mutually constitutive imbrication. It would also fail to answer the question of how the intolerable should be faced (here one might think about how one would face an ethically abhorrent entity such as the Taliban without force, which is not the same as saying that the current course of action is acceptable). What would society look like that treated such an ethical demand without resort to force? This is a more complex question than the legal proscription of organised force.

Overall, this last point leads me to reassert something that I originally borrowed from Justin Rosenberg – specifically, that the failure of opponents of war to grasp the problem of the mutually constitutive imbrication of (as Waltz would put it) man, the state and war, means that realist theories still maintain their hegemony on thinking about the contemporary global political condition.² Displacing realist theories of interstate violence would require examining the mutually constitutive relation of war and modern society and thinking in more complex terms (than simply proscribing one of those terms) about how that relation might be contested.