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.

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.

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 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)

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.

I will be talking about what we can learn from the contemporary securitisation of the urban environment. You can find my abstract as well as those of other speakers here. It promises to be a very interesting event.

Although there are many possible themes to investigate regarding climate change and security/violence, I want to explore two in particular:

1. The way in which urban securitisation tells us a lot about the way in which authorities will react to future violences such as those that result from climate change. The various ways in which cities have become the arena for, or target of, military operations tells us a lot about the way in which governments will respond to future insecurities in/of the urban environment. The restriction of circulation and the hardening of urban infrastructure demonstrate the way in which urban fabric is seen as something to which access must be controlled. This is ominous for an era in which climate change could lead to greater rural-urban migration. Such influxes will likely lead to greater hardening of the urban environment and increased attempts to control access to urban fabric.
2. The way in which climate change is itself seen as a potential threat to the city. For example, hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans shows how flooding –an often predicated consequence of climate change – poses a grave risk to the city. But responses to this perceived threat are problematic insofar as they posit a separateness between ‘the environment’ and ‘the city’. This separation is a long standing one that has its roots in the separation of the rural and urban and the positing of the former as ‘natural’ and the latter as ‘man-made’ Unfortunately, this puts the city and nature in a zero-sum relation in which each is exterior to, and competitive with, the other. This is problematic because it hides an intellectual confusion in which ecology and the city are taken to be conceptually separate. But – as I have written elsewhere – the city is characterised by a complex ecology. Investigating the complex ecologies at play in the city: especially the ecological systems of infrastructural support – will tell us much about how we might begin to pose the problems of the urban millennium in a way which sees climate change not as a threat to be excluded, but as a dynamic integral to the development of the future city.