In March, Cambridge Review of International Affairs published my review of Jon Calame and Esther Charlesworth’s book Divided Cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). I was busy teaching this spring and so forgot to write about it at the time – but I have returned to thinking about some of these themes in the wake of recent riots in Belfast. (more…)
For those interested in the role of networks in contemporary warfare, Chris Wilson’s recent Searching for Saddam: A five-part series on how the U.S. military used social networking to capture the Iraqi dictator in Slate is worth reading. Wilson provides an accessible account of social network analysis and the manner in which interconnections can be mapped. His account of the construction of link diagrams to identify those that were harbouring Saddam after he had been deposed from power in 2003, resonates with much that has been written about the relationship of networks and contemporary warfare.
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Two articles in the Guardian on the Chilean earthquake caught my eye on Monday:
Over the past few months I have been part of an ad hoc working group with colleagues from Newcastle and Durham Universities that has been exploring the future of academic publishing. Two problematics framed our analysis: how are changes initiated by the digital economy affecting academic journals and how might the editorial team of a top flight journal in the social sciences respond to these challenges? As previously posted–here and here–our initial conclusions have been that current models of academic journal publishing that rely on limiting access to research through pay-walls are no longer sustainable.
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On Thursday and Friday (19th & 20th November) I will be at the World Politics and Popular Culture conference organised by Newcastle University Politics staff Simon Philpott, Matt Davies and Kyle Grayson. The conference will explore the manner in which
I will be giving a paper entitled Zombies and flesh eaters: imagining urban cataclysm in the era of metropolitanisation. The paper will discuss the relation between the politics of global urbanisation and representations of urban cataclysm in the film 28 Days Later, video game Resident Evil; and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. I argue that novels, films and games are textual artefacts embedded in complex assemblages of things, signs, meanings and affects. As such they are mutually imbricated with the dynamics of delineation and contestation we refer to as ‘politics’. The paper discusses two particular ideas arising from a reading of these texts: |
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A while ago I was asked to review Kyle Grayson’s excellent Chasing Dragons: Security, Identity, and Illicit Drugs for the on-line journal Global Discourse. The journal has recently published the review as part of a forum alongside another review by Andrés Perezalonso (Newcastle University) and a response from Kyle himself.
You can read the forum here (html) or download my review here (pdf) and Kyle Grayson’s response here (pdf).
For those interested in reading further, google books has a limited preview of Chasing Dragons. You can read Kyle’s blog here.
Crisis Forum have posted some of the resources from the workshop on climate change and violence held last week (9th October 2009). These resources include (or will include in the near future) videos of most of the presentations as well as power-point slides.
You can find the notes for my presentation at the workshop here. Please note that these are rough notes prepared for speaking at this event. They are not an academic paper. As such they do not include the usual references and acknowledgements that would be expected in an academic paper. If you want further details about the sources referred to in the notes, please contact me.
The Society for Curious Thought have posted a brief piece of mine entitled Cities Under Fire. You can read it here.
The piece outlines the main topic I will deal with in my next book (also entitled Cities Under Fire and due for publication by Routledge in 2011/12). Briefly these are the organised violences that are arrayed against the contemporary city: urbicide, terrorism, military operations by advanced industrial states. The piece is short and so does not expand on the characteristics of these violences or their impact on urbanity. For more detail and an early formulation of the problematic central to Cites Under Fire see my recent piece in Security Dialogue: ‘Network-Centric Violence, Critical Infrastructure and the Urbanization of Security‘ (Security Dialogue, 40:4-5, pp.399-418)
Security Dialogue have published a very interesting special issue on urban insecurity. You can see the table of contents here.
The special issue includes my essay ‘Network-centric Violence, Critical Infrastructure and the Urbanisation of Security‘. In this piece I discuss the manner in which organised violence such as the American ‘shock and awe‘ assault on Iraq and terrorist targeting of transport infrastructure in New York, Madrid and London are exemplary of the dynamics of what I call the ‘urbanisation of security’. The urbanisation of security comprises a reciprocal dynamic in which security technologies are urbanised (i.e., oriented towards the logics of urban space) and yet at the same time urbanity is securitised (i.e., its spaces are reshaped according to logics of security technologies).
The copyright agreement I had to sign to have this article published prevents me from making the final version of the article available for free on this site (believe me, I wish I could). You can download a final draft of the essay here (pdf). If you have problems obtaining the published version email me and I will send you a pdf if appropriate.
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