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.

Calame and Charlesworth’s book is an interesting set of reflections based on rich fieldwork that offers scholars of urban violence much to think about. The central concern of the book is precisely the kind of divisions that are evident in the violence that erupted around the annual Orange Order parades in Northern Ireland last week. Indeed, Divided Cities is focused on the question of how urban environments become deeply divided and what might be done about this.

Calame and Charlesworth – as well as Lebeus Woods in the forward to the book – argue that divisions are likely to haunt the city in the present era as urbanisation leads to increased frictions between different communities and urban managers fail to provide the overarching security these groups need to allow them to live in proximity without fear. Overall they see divisions such as we see in Belfast or Nicosia as the formalisation of ad hoc arrangements to provide temporary security. Over time fences grow into walls and become indispensable to narratives of identity and safety.

What I find interesting is the notion of the city embedded into the book. Calame and Charlesworth take the walled city as their paradigm for understanding the contract that supposedly exists between city managers and citizens. This contract  is portrayed as one where citizens give up  some income or freedom in return for safety. Originally it is argued that this took the form of citizens in medieval walled cities being protected from those external to the city. But in the present era it is argued that citizens should be protected from forms of friction that might arise within the city. I find three consequences of this depiction of the supposed ‘urban contract’ of interest.

Firstly, it is – like most theories in International Relations – predicated on the idea that security is prophylactic action in which an individual or community is protected from an external threat by some form of gap or barrier. Conceptually this narrative is based on the idea that the walled city provided security by excluding dangerous others. But if this is the conceptual trope that underlies this narrative it is perhaps unsurprising to see urban managers moving the wall within the city to solve problems of urban friction. Moreover, if walls signify the exclusion of others, it is also natural for those who find their worlds cleft by walls to regard those on the other side of them as others. Basing the story on the walled city thus has the effect of normalising the relation of walls and security in a way that stores problems for the future.

Secondly, I find the idea of the managed city somewhat idealistic. The notion of a bargain of income/freedom for security resonates with the idea of a social contract. And yet we know that no actual social contract exists – it is a hypothetical device to try to envisage how a political settlement might have been reached. In reality the political bargian a contract is supposed to capture is only ever implicit. More often this bargin is imagined by observers looking back into the past and seeking to explain why a political order managed to be stable for a while. In practice the particular configuration of politics at any one time is a result of the sedimentation of a number of non-linear processes. Moreover, attempts generate a contract are invariably disrupted by the contingencies of real life. To argue for a contract between urban managers and citizens is thus to imagine a political rebirth that, in reality, can never happen (nor ever really did happen). Perhaps the greater question is how accommodations can be made between currently antagonistic parties so that walls are removed without a central authority.

Finally, there is an interesting question at the heart of Calame and Charlesworth’s work about the friction that is inherent to the city. Of course it is undesirable to have walls that encourage us to fear the others that lie beyond them. This can only promote cycles of violence. And yet, cities are marked by a plurality that will always entail a certain irresolvable provocation or friction. It is this irresolvable friction that Jean-Luc Nancy refers to when he notes that the city has been philosophy’s problem. Because rationality likes to have single answers it hates the ambivalence of irresolvable tension or friction. As such it tries to impose its will on the city to remove the ambivalence that rises from continual friction. Urban planning and urban militarism are good examples of this lack of tolerance for ambivalence and tension. The question that must be addressed is how to acknowledge tension and friction without letting it solidify into walls.

So, while I enjoyed reading Divided Cities, it left me with many questions. You can read a pre publication draft here.

Wilson’s account touches on several of the classic tropes of what John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt called ‘netwar‘. For example, he outlines the contrast between hierarchical organisations and horizontally affiliated networks.  This transition from the vertical to the horizontal is a common trope of discourses on networks and netwar. For example, Arquilla and Ronfeldt argued that “netwar differs from modes of conflict and crime in which the protagonists prefer to develop formal, stand-alone, hierarchical organizations, doctrines, and strategies”.¹ Mary Kaldor has similarly argued that so-called  ‘new wars‘ are characterised by horizontal affiliation rather than hierarchical organisation.

Wilson’s story also points to what Arquilla and Ronfeldt referred to as the “blurring of offense and defense”. ² That family networks are both a source of insurgent violence and protection emphasises Arquilla and Rondfeldt’s point that networks blend offensive and defensive capacities. This blurring is said to lead, moreover, to the most problematic feature of networks, namely that they tend :

to defy and cut across standard boundaries, jurisdictions, and distinctions between state and society, public and private, war and peace, war and crime, civilian and military, police and military, and legal and illegal. This makes it difficult if not impossible for a government to assign responsibility to any single agency—e.g., military, police, or intelligence—to be in charge of responding.³

This defying of ‘standard boundaries’ is exemplified in the way that the basic tools being used to capture Saddam can be used both to supply intelligence to a military campaign and for social networking such as seen on facebook. The ambivalence (literally ambi-valence) of the network means that it defies the boundary between the connectivity of friendship ⁴ and the destructive, deconstructive dynamics of warfighting. This ambivalence is, of course, precisely why networked entities are confusing and ambiguous. And why Arquilla and Ronfeldt note the difficulty the military and police will have in understanding their transgressive nature and isolating the threats they are perceived to pose.

However, in addition to being an excellent illustration of the various arguments about the potential of networks in the contemporary era,  this is also a story about the power of the network as a discursive trope. In other words, this article shows that the network is becoming a powerful trope organising the thoughts of those engaged in counter-insurgency. I have noted elsewhere that the discursive trope of interconnection associated with networks has driven practice in the US military in particular directions. In particular I have argued that it leads to a radical expansion of battlespace. Previously , for example, cities might have been regarded as a territorial zone to be avoided by forces for both ethical and operational reasons. However, the trope of the network encourages engagement with nodes in a web of interconnection rather than the assault and occupation of territorial zones. This leads to an expansion of what might be considered legitimate battlespace. Just as the target of military operations shifted from Iraq’s armed forces to its family trees, so network centric warfare has shifted from the invasion and occupation of spatial zones to the application of force to perceived nodal points, wherever they may be. ⁵ The network – whether it is a genuine empirical phenomenon or not – is thus an important discursive trope guiding the organisation of violence in the contemporary era.

You can see a further discussion of the role such network analysis might play in the war on terror based on Wilson’s Slate article here.

Footnotes

• In Chile’s earthquake was horrible – but it could have been so much worse Rory Carrol points to the material differences between the Chilean earthquake and January’s much more destructive Haiti quake. The tectonic movements that Carol points to as the determinant of a quake’s strength are a reminder of the irruptive materiality of the environment. What caught my eye in this report, however, was the reference to the manner in which the urban fabric was key to the fate of the population in both cases. The nature of materials used and their organisation via building codes led to different outcomes in both cases. Indeed, as Jane Bennett has argued, we could say that the buildings in these cases have a certain agency – for example, they are described as swaying, rather than resisting the quake in the Chilean case (and thus preventing a repeat of the catastrophic death toll seen in Haiti). As such the entity to which we must refer in any understanding of this quake and its socio-political consequences, form a complex assemblage of people and things, reaffirming the importance of according materiality its proper place when considering such events.

• Chilean military takes control of quake-hit cities [followed on Tuesday by Chile earthquake: Troops sent in to deter looting and violence], reminded me of the power of Richard Norton’s concept of Feral Cities. Norton’s essay casts the urban centres of the global south as a primary threat in the contemporary period (echoing Robert Kaplan to some extent). Norton sees these urban centres as potentially slipping back into a state of nature. On the one hand infrastructures could be overwhelmed by environmental events such as earthquakes (as in the case of Chile) or rising seas levels. On the other hand Norton perceives cities in the global south as having a propensity to lawlessness – as being on the cusp of a return to a Hobbesian state of nature. This has led to the perception that urban order and military force should be closely linked. As Steve Graham has noted, this was seen very clearly in the militarised response to Hurricane Katrina. In the case of Katrina and Chile, looting is perceived as an indicator of a dangerous lawlessness that must be met with military force, rather than a rational response to the collapse of the infrastructures of contemporary urbanity. As such, then, although we might not like Norton’s vision (and indeed it is one that – like Kaplan’s – I would prefer to read as an imaginative geography than a statement of fact) its tropes can be observed exercising a powerful grip on contemporary events.

The project is based at the University of Manchester and Ralf Brand is the principle investigator (with Jon Coaffee as co-investigator and Sara Fregonese as Research Assistant). Overall the aim of the project is to explore the interrelation between the urban environment and  socio-political polarisation. Polarisation is assumed to have links with political violence (including radicalisation). You can read more about the project here.

The project is of interest to me precisely because it suggests that the urban environment has a constitutive role to play in socio-political dynamics. Rather than viewing the urban environment from an anthropocentric perspective, the project seeks to examine how material structures play a role in shaping (while also being shaped by) socio-political polarisation (and attendant dynamics of violence).  In a recent paper arising out of this project Ralf Brand has referred to the urban environment as a  ‘socio-active artefact’ in order to explain the relation between urban environment and socio-political dynamics. This speaks to the interest I have in understanding the manner in which buildings are constitutive of distinctive spaces as well as to the way in which certain forms of political violence attack buildings in order to destroy the spaces they constitute.  It is precisely because the urban environment is ‘socio-active’ that it is targeted, if it were inert (as some anthropocentric accounts assume) it would be of little interest. The idea that the building is a ‘socio-active artefact’ is thus very helpful when thinking about the mechanisms underlying urbicide.

For those interested in reading further, Ralf Brand has a paper in Urban Studies outlining some of the ways in which architecture and polarisation are inter-related: “Written and Unwritten Building Conventions in a Contested City”. There will also be a special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology which will include a review of literature concerning urban polarisation.

Routledge have recently published an interesting volume on urban infrastructure. Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, edited by Stephen Graham explores various cases in which infrastructure fails, revealing the extent to which contemporary urban life is predicated on technical structures.

It should be of interest to those exploring the nexus of violence, urbanisation and critical infrastructure.

Click on the book cover on the left to see contents and read an extract

A flyer giving 20% discount on the book can be downloaded here.

Popular mobile services include money transfers, allowing people without bank accounts to send money by text message. Many farmers use mobiles to trade and check market prices.

Elsewhere I have written about the way in which communications infrastructures are constitutive of contemporary urbanised ways of life. These figures – and the manner in which mobile phones have become integral to accessing vital services – reaffirm this point.

What is interesting, however, is the manner in which the mobile phone is a flexible, rather than static, infrastructure. While phone masts and associated relay technologies are static, the handset itself permits (or even encourages) circulation. This flexibility can be conterposed to the static infrastructures of modern urbanisation, many of which simply tied particular sites into fixed relations. It is particularly interesting in this regard to note that fixed phone lines saw a ‘slight decline’ in 2008.

Fixed infrastructures generate particular spatial patterns of urban development. In particular they can bypass and exclude certain sections of the population (for an excellent discussion of this dynamic see Steven Graham and Simon Marvin’s Splintering Urbanism). While mobile infrastructures do not in any sense offer a panacea when it comes to countering such exclusionary dynamics, it is interesting to ask how they will affect the spatial patterns of contemporary metropolitan development. Fixed infrastructures are constitutive of patterns such as suburbanisation (where roads and telephone lines, for example, fixes particular suburbs in relation to a city centre). As the renting of mobile phones shows, flexible infrastructures might permit different patterns of urbanization. In particular it might mean that it is no longer necessary for particular segments of the urban population to congregate in those places where fixed infrastructures are densest. While this will probably not lead to a reversal of the gap between rich and poor it may complexify the core-periphery pattern of urbanisation epitomised by suburbanisation.

Furthermore, it is interesting to ask about the ways of life constituted by such technologies. Urban life has always been hybrid and cyborg. However, will mobile technologies generate distinctive forms of circulatory cyborg urbanity? While the political subject constituted in relation to the fixed phone line is a projection of self from one static point to another, the mobile phone user is, by definition in circulation. The political possibilities of such subjects are already in evidence from the mobility of anti-capitalist protesters to the networked structures of terrorist organisations. Mobile infrastructures are thus constitutive of novel political subjectivities.

Keeping an eye on these infrastructural trends will thus be important for understanding the potentialities of politics in an era of global urbanisation.

Further details including a program for the workshop can be found here. Speakers will include Michael J Shapiro, Ash Amin, Joe Painter, Angharad Closs Stephens, Martin Coward, Steve Graham, Vicki Squire, Jennifer Bagelman and Delacey Tedesco.

The event is being jointly organised the Politics-Space-State research cluster, Durham University & the BISA Poststructural Politics Working Group. Angharad Closs Stephens is the main organiser, with additional assistance from myself, Louise Amoore, Michele Lancione and Eduardo Neve-Jimenez.

Places at the workshop are free but limited. Please contact Angharad Closs Stephens if you would like to know more and/or are interested in attending.

My paper will be entitled ‘Agonism, community, urbanity’. It will comprise comments designed to draw together the themes of agonism and community as they have been developed to date in my work. Briefly, it will examine the inter-related concepts of agonism and community in order to outline an understanding of the city as an ontological terrain characterised by provocation and difference. I have argued elsewhere that agonism is a fundamental characteristic of the built environment and, hence, of the city. This point is important because it questions the benign notions of plurality that often characterise urban theorising. Instead it conceives of the city as a continual experience of confrontation and friction which, while not necessarily always violent, poses a deep ontological challenge to individual subjects on a daily basis. This conception of the agonistic nature or city life poses, however, the question of community or being-together (as we must be-together in order to be in provocative relation). Community might seem to be the antithesis of agonism: a haven from the buffeting gale of provocation. However, I will turn to Jean-Luc Nancy to understand how we might reconceptualise community as being-with in order to think through the problem of the relation between agonism and community. I will suggest that a conception of community emerges that helps us to understand how we might respond to urban violence in a manner that shows a certain care for difference rather than a nostalgia for homogeneity.