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Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccit20 Cities as Battlespace: The New Military Urbanism Stephen Graham Published online: 10 Dec 2009. To cite this article: Stephen Graham (2009) Cities as Battlespace: The New Military Urbanism, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 13:4, 383-402, DOI: 10.1080/13604810903298425 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604810903298425 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions Cities as battlespace (above) Transparent cities (below) D o w n l o a d e d
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CITY, VOL. 13, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2009 ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/09/040383-20 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13604810903298425 Cities as battlespace The new military urbanism Stephen Graham Taylor and Francis The latest in an ongoing series of papers on the links between militarism and urbanism published in City, this paper opens with an exploration of the emerging crossovers between the targeting of everyday life in so-called smart border and homeland security programmes and related efforts to delegate the sovereign power to deploy lethal force to increasingly robotized and automated war machines. Arguing that both cases represent examples of a new military urbanism, the rest of the paper develops a thesis outlining the scope and power of contemporary interpenetrations between urbanism and militarism. The new military urbanism is defined as encompassing a complex set of rapidly evolving ideas, doctrines, practices, norms, techniques and popular cultural arenas through which the everyday spaces, sites and infrastructures of citiesalong with their civilian populations are now rendered as the main targets and threats within a limitless battlespace. The new military urbanism, it is argued, rests on five related pillars; these are explored in turn. Included here are the normalization of militarized practices of tracking and targeting everyday urban circulations; the two-way movement of political, juridical and technologi- cal techniques between homeland cities and cities on colonial frontiers; the rapid growth of sprawling, transnational industrial complexes fusing military and security companies with technology, surveillance and entertainment ones; the deployment of political violence against and through everyday urban infrastructure by both states and non-state fighters; and the increasingly seamless fusing of militarized veins of popular, urban and material culture. The paper finishes by discussing the new political imaginations demanded by the new military urbanism. Key words: military urbanism; militarisation; security; battlespace; surveillance; war Target intercept n 14 November 2007, Jacqui Smith, then the UKs Home Secretary, announced one of the most ambitious attempts by any state in history to systematically track and surveil all persons entering or leaving its borders. Using technology developed by the Trusted Borders consortium led by the massive Raytheon defense corporation, the UKs highly controversial E-borders programme will deploy sophisticated computer algorithms and data mining techniques, along with biometric scanning, to continually try to identify illegal or threatening people or behaviours before they threaten the UKs territorial limits. The E-borders project is based on a dream of technological omniscience: of O D o w n l o a d e d
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GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 385 tracking all the flows of people that cross the UKs borders whilst using databases of past activities and associations to identify future threats before they materialize. When the system is supposed to be fully established in 2014although many argue that its simple unworkability will lead to inevitable delaysSmith promises that control and security will be reinstated for the UK in a radically mobile and insecure world. All travellers to Britain will be screened against no fly lists and intercept target lists, she predicts. Together with biometric visas, this will help keep trouble away from our shores As well as the tougher double check at the border, ID cards for foreign nationals will soon give us a triple check in country (Kobe, 2007). (In a rich irony, another surveillance systemInternet viewing billsalmost forced Smith to resign in late March 2009, when it was discovered that she tried to claim for the costs of her husbands pornographic viewing habits as parliamentary expenses. Eventually, she did resign on 2 June 2009 after further controversy surrounding her expenses claims.) Smiths language heretarget lists, screening, biometric visas and so on reveals a great deal. For projects like the UKs E-borders programme represent attempts to push forward a startling militari- zation of civil society. They rest on the extension of military ideas of tracking, iden- tification and targeting into the quotidian spaces and circulations of everyday life. Indeed, as attempts to fix identity to biometric scans of peoples bodies, to use computers to pick out dangerous people from the mass and flux of the background city, and to link databases of past activity to continuously target the immediate future, projects like the UKs E-borders programme are best understood not merely as state responses to changing security threats. Rather, they represent dramatic translations of long-standing military dreams of high-tech and technophiliac omniscience and rational- ity into the governance of urban civil society. With both security and military doctrine within Western states now centring on the task of identifying insurgents, terrorists or malign threats from the chaotic background of urban life, this point becomes clearer still. As I have argued previously in the pages of City (Graham, 2008), whether in the queues of Heathrow, the tube stations of London or the streets of Kabul and Baghdad, this latest doctrine stresses that means must be found of automatically identifying and targeting threatening people and circulations in advance of their materialization, when they are effectively indistinguishable from the wider urban crowd. Hence the parallel drive in cities within both the capitalist heart- lands of the Global North, and the worlds colonial peripheries and frontiers, to estab- lish high-tech surveillance systems which mine data accumulated about the past to continually identify insurgent or terrorist actions in the near future. Armed vision: their sons against our silicon At the root of such imaginations of war and security in the post-cold war world are tech- nophiliac fantasies where the West harnesses its unassailable high-tech power to reinstate its waning influence in a rapidly urbanizing and intensely mobile world. At home and abroad, wrote US security theorists Mark Mills and Peter Huber in the right-wing City Journal in 2002, a year after the 9/11 attacks, it will end up as their sons against our silicon. Our silicon will win. Mills and Huber (2002) envisage a near future straight out of Minority Report. In their vision, a whole suite of surveillance and tracking systems develop on the back of high-tech systems of consump- tion, communication and transportation to permeate every aspect of life in Western or US cities. Continually comparing current behaviour with vast databases recording past events and associations, these, the argument goes, will automatically signal when the citys bodies, spaces and infrastructure systems are D o w n l o a d e d
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386 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4 about to be turned into terrorist threats against it. Thus, what Mills and Huber call trustworthy or cooperative targets are continually separated from non-cooperators characterized by their efforts to use postal, electricity, Internet, finance, airline and trans- port systems as means to project resistance and violence. In effect, Mills and Hubers vision calls for an extension of airport-style security and surveillance systems to encom- pass entire cities and societies using the high- tech systems of consumption and mobility that are already established in Western cities as a basis. In resistant colonial frontiers, meanwhile, Mills and Huber dream of continuous, auto- mated and robotized counterinsurgency warfare. Using systems similar to those deployed in US cities, but this time delegated with the sovereign power to kill automati- cally, they imagine that US troops might be removed from the dirty job of fighting and killing on the ground in dense cities. Swarms of tiny, armed drones, equipped with advanced sensors and communicating with each other, will thus be deployed to perma- nently loiter above streets, deserts and high- ways. Automatically identifying insurgent behaviour, Mills and Huber dream of a future where such swarms of robotic warriors work to continually project destructive power precisely, judiciously, and from a safe distanceweek after week, year after year, for as long as may be necessary (2002). Such two-sided dreams of high-tech omnipotence remain much more than sci-fi fantasy, however. As well as constructing the UKs E-borders programme, for example, Raytheon are also the leading manufacturer of both cruise missiles and the unmanned drones used regularly by the CIA to launch assassination raidsand kill large numbers of innocent bystandersacross the Middle East and Pakistan since 2002. Crucially, Raytheon are also at the heart of a range of very real US military projects designed to use similar kinds of anticipatory targeting software to allow robotic weapons systems to automatically target and kill their foes without any human involvement whatsoever (Figure 1). Figure 1 Two images reflecting the centrality of armed vision to the new military urbanism. Top is the US Department of Defenses vision of identity dominance through the continuous fusion of a whole series of biometric databases. As with the UKs E-borders project, the technophiliac fantasy here is of omniscient control based on linking past associations and predictions of future risks, permanently targeting everyday urban circulations around the world in the process. Such a vision blurs worryingly with techniques of deploying lethal force against distant targets through armed drones controlled from video-game-like controls located on distant continents (bottom). Here air force pilots are controlling an armed Predator drone used to undertake targeted assassination raids within Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, operating from within the inside of a virtual reality cave at Nellis Air Force Base on the edge of Las Vegas. Major development efforts are underway to remove the pilot altogether, allowing such drones to automatically deploy their missiles against targets identified by their own software using target databases similar to those underpinning smart border projects. Sources: (Top) John D. Woodward, Jr., Director, Using Biometrics in the Global War on Terrorism, Department of Defense, Biometrics Management Office, West Virginia University, Biometric Studies Program, 7 April 2005 (US military: public domain). (Bottom) http://www.163rw.ang.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/090402-F-8801D-002.jpg (US military: public domain). Thus, whether they involve automated policing of no fly lists, or the delegation of the sovereign power to kill, software algo- rithms must now be seen as a broad contin- uum of linked techniques. These use historic accumulations of data to make judgments about future potentialities as a means of permanently deploying continuous contem- porary violence against the everyday sites and circulations of the city (Amoore, 2009). Media theorist Jordan Crandall (1999) has called this the formation of a constellation of what he calls armed vision. The key ques- tion now, he suggests, is how targets are identified and distinguished from non- targets within decision making and killing. Crandall (1999) points out that the wide- spread integration of computerized tracking with databases of targets represents little but of a gradual colonization of the now, a now always slightly ahead of itself. This shift represents a process of profound militariza- tion because the social identification of people or circulations within civilian law enforcement is complemented or even replaced by the machinic seeing of targets. While civilian images are embedded in processes of identification based on reflec- tion, Crandall writes, militarised perspec- tives collapse identification processes into Id-ingone-way channel of identification in which a conduit, a database, and a body are aligned and calibrated. The new military urbanism Such crossovers between high-technology for civilian borders, and high-technology for military killing, between the targeting of everyday life in Western cities and those caught in the cross-hairs of aggressive colo- nial and resource wars, are at the heart of a much broader set of trends which I label the new military urbanism (Graham, 2010). Of course the results of the targeting practices in D o w n l o a d e d
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GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 387 Figure 1 Two images reflecting the centrality of armed vision to the new military urbanism. Top is the US Department of Defenses vision of identity dominance through the continuous fusion of a whole series of biometric databases. As with the UKs E-borders project, the technophiliac fantasy here is of omniscient control based on linking past associations and predictions of future risks, permanently targeting everyday urban circulations around the world in the process. Such a vision blurs worryingly with techniques of deploying lethal force against distant targets through armed drones controlled from video-game-like controls located on distant continents (bottom). Here air force pilots are controlling an armed Predator drone used to undertake targeted assassination raids within Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, operating from within the inside of a virtual reality cave at Nellis Air Force Base on the edge of Las Vegas. Major development efforts are underway to remove the pilot altogether, allowing such drones to automatically deploy their missiles against targets identified by their own software using target databases similar to those underpinning smart border projects. Sources: (Top) John D. Woodward, Jr., Director, Using Biometrics in the Global War on Terrorism, Department of Defense, Biometrics Management Office, West Virginia University, Biometric Studies Program, 7 April 2005 (US mili- tary: public domain). (Bottom) http://www.163rw.ang.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/090402-F-8801D- 002.jpg (US military: public domain). D o w n l o a d e d
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388 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4 both casesthe hand on the shoulder in the airport queue or the alleged Taliban base left in smouldering ruinsare very different. But, crucially, both represent acts of violence which rest at either end of a continuum based on the core ideas driving the new military urbanism. These are based on the triumph of highly profitable, militarized solutions, based on technophiliac dreams of high-tech target- ing and the linkage of surveillance databases to the automatic identification of future targets, to address pressing questions of both security and war in rapidly urbanizing, globalized societies. As I have suggested before in my recent papers for City on the deepening connections between militarism and urbanism, the new military urbanism encompasses a complex set of rapidly evolving ideas, doctrines, practices, norms, techniques and popular cultural arenas (Graham, 2005, 2006, 2008). Through these the everyday spaces, sites and infrastructures of citiesalong with their civilian popula- tionsare now rendered as the main targets and threats. It is manifest in the widespread metaphorization of war as the perpetual and boundless condition of urban societies against drugs, against crime, against terror, against insecurity itself. It involves the stealthy militarization of a wide range of policy debates, urban landscapes and circuits of urban infrastructure, as well as realms of popular and urban culture. And it is leading to the creeping and insidious diffusion of milita- rized debates about security into every walk of life. Together, these work to bring essen- tially military ideas of the prosecution of, and preparation for, warfare into the heart of everyday urban life. The new military urbanism represents an insidious militarization of urban life at a time when our planet is urbanizing faster than ever before. This process gains its power from multiple circuits of militarization and securitization which are rarely considered together or viewed as a whole. To understand its breadth, as well as its insidious power, it is necessary to look at the new military urban- isms five constituent pillars in a little more detail. In what follows, I explore each of these in turn. Urbanizing security The truth of the continual targeting of the world, as the fundamental form of knowledge production, is xenophobia, the inability to handle the otherness of the other beyond the orbit that is the bombers own visual path. Every effort needs to be made to sustain and secure this orbitthat is, by keeping the place of the other-as-target always filled. (Chow, 2006, p. 42) Taking the high-tech surveillance and target- ing point first, it is important to stress at the outset that, as with Mills and Hubers vision just noted, the new military urbanism rests on a central idea: that essentially militarized practices of tracking and targeting must perpetually colonize the geographies of cities and the spaces of everyday life in both the homelands of the metropoles of the West and the various neo-colonial frontiers and peripheries around the world. To the latest security and military gurus, this imperative is deemed to be the only adequate means to address the new realities of what they call asymmetric or irregular war. Dominating political violence in the post- cold war, such wars pitch non-state terrorists or insurgents against high-tech security, mili- tary and intelligence forces of nation-states. Non-uniformed and largely indistinguish- able from the mass of the city, such non-state actors, moreover, lurk invisibly within the camouflage, density and anonymity offered by the worlds burgeoning cities (especially the fast-growing informal districts). They also both exploit and target the spiralling flows and circulations which link cities together: the Internet, You Tube videos, mobile phones, air travel, global tourism, international migration, port systems, global financial flows, even postal and power systems. Recent terrorist outrages in New York, Washington, Madrid or London and Mumbai D o w n l o a d e d
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GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 389 (to name but a few), along with state military assaults on the urban sites of Baghdad, Gaza, Nablus, Beirut, Groznyy, Mogadishu and South Ossetia, demonstrate that asymmetric warfare and political violence now takes place across transnational spaces while at the same time telescoping through the streets, spaces and infrastructures of a rapidly urbanizing world. Increasingly, the worlds main battle- grounds are thus profoundly urban, architec- tural and infrastructural spaces. More and more, contemporary warfare takes place in supermarkets, tower blocks, subway tunnels and industrial districts rather than open fields, jungles or deserts. All this means that, arguably for the first time since the Middle Ages, the localized geographies of cities and the systems that link them together are starting to dominate discussions surrounding war, geopolitics and security. In the new military doctrine of asymmetric waralso labelled low intensity conflict, netwar, the long war or fourth generation warthe prosaic and everyday sites, circulations and spaces of the city are becoming the main battlespace (Blackmore, 2005) both at home and abroad. The battlespace concept, indeed, is pivotal to the new military urbanism because it basi- cally sustains a conception of military matters that includes absolutely everything (Agre, 2001). As distinct from geographically and temporally limited notions of war like battle- field, the battlespace concept prefigures a boundless and unending process of milita- rization where everything becomes a site of permanent war. Nothing lies outside battlespace, temporally or geographically. Battlespace has no front and no back and no start or end. It is deep, high, wide, and simultaneous: there is no longer a front or a rear (Blackmore, 2005, p. 34). The concept of battlespace thus permeates everything from the molecular scales of genetic engineering and nanotechnology through the everyday sites, spaces and experiences of city life, to the plan- etary spheres of space or the Internets globe- straddling cyberspace. 1 The conceptwhich is at the heart of all contemporary efforts to urbanize military and security doctrinethus works by collapsing conventional military civilian binaries. It stresses the way in which everyday urban sites and circulations contin- ually telescope local into global. And it sustains an urbanization of military and secu- rity doctrine as cities and urban sites are prob- lematized as key strategic sites whose density, clutter, unpredictability and vulnerability require new security lock-downs and radi- cally new military paradigms. In such a context, Western security and military doctrine is being rapidly reimagined in ways that dramatically blur legal and oper- ational separations between policing, intelli- gence and military force; distinctions between war and peace; and those between local and global scales. State power centres more and more on efforts to try and separate mobilities and bodies deemed malign and threatening from those deemed valuable and threatened within the everyday spaces of cities. Instead of legal or human rights and legal systems based on universal citizenship, these emerging security politics are based on the use of the latest identification, surveil- lance, tracking and database technologies to pre-emptively profile individuals, places and groups. Such practices place them within various risk classes based on anticipations of their likelihood to resist or commit violence, disruption or resistance. This shift threatens to re-engineer ideas of citizenship and borders that have been at the heart of the concept of the Western nation- state since the mid-17th century. An increas- ing obsession with pre-emptive risk profiling, for example, threatens to use the accoutrements of national security states to effectively differentiate always fragile ideas of universal national citizenship. In other words, different pre-emptive risk profiles, embedded within emerging national ID card systems, and based on surveillance of past associations, threaten to translate into varied political entitlements within the body of national citizenry as populations are mapped for propensities to harbour threats. As an example, the USA is already pressuring the D o w n l o a d e d
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390 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4 UK to bring in a visa system only for UK citizens who want to visit the USA who have close links to Pakistan. In other words, such developments threaten to establish bordering practicesthe definition of the geographical and social insides and outsides of political communitieswithin the spaces of nation- states. This process parallels, in turn, the eruption of national border points within the territorial limits of nations at airports and fast rail stations. Meanwhile, the policing, security and intelligence powers of nations are also reach- ing out beyond national territorial limits as global surveillance systems are built to follow the geographies of the worlds airline, port, trade and communications systemsan attempt to give early warning of malign urban circulations or insurgent attacks before they reach the strategic heartlands of West- ern global cities. National E-border programmes, for examplelike the one in the UKare being integrated into transna- tional systems so that passengers behaviour and associations can be data-mined before they attempt to board planes bound for Europe and the USA. Policing practices are also extending beyond the borders of nation- states. The New York Police Department, for example, has recently established a chain of 10 overseas offices as part of its burgeon- ing anti-terror efforts. Extra-national polic- ing is also proliferating around major political summits or sporting events. Such extensions of policing powers beyond national borders are occurring just as military forces are deploying much more regularly within Western nations. The USA recently established a military command for North America for the first time: the North- ern Command. 2 Previously, this was the only part of the world not so covered. The US Government has also gradually reduced long- standing legal barriers to military deploy- ment within US cities. Urban warfare training exercises thus now regularly take place in US cities, geared towards simulations of homeland security crises as well as the challenges of pacifying insurgencies in the cities of colonial peripheries in the Global South. In addition, in a dramatic convergence of doctrine, high-tech satellites and drones honed to surveil far-off cold war or insurgent enemies are increasingly being applied within the cities of Western nations. Foucaults boomerang War has [] re-invaded human society in a more complex, more extensive, more concealed, and more subtle manner. (Qiao and Wang, 2002, p. 2) The new military urbanisms second key pillar involves the generalization of experi- ments with new styles of targeting and tech- nology in colonial war zones like Gaza or Baghdad, or security operations surrounding major sporting events or political summits, as security exemplars to be sold on through the worlds burgeoning homeland security markets. Through such processes of imita- tion, explicitly colonial models of pacifica- tion, militarization and control, honed on the streets of Global South cities, increasingly diffuse to the cities of capitalist heartlands in the Global North. International studies scholar Lorenzo Veracini (2005) has diagnosed a dramatic contemporary resurgence in the importation of typically colonial tropes and techniques into the management and development of cities in the metropolitan cores of Europe and North America. Such a process, he argues, is working to gradually unravel a classic and long lasting distinction between an outer face and an inner face of the colonial condition. It is important to stress, then, that the resurgence of explicitly colonial strategies and techniques amongst nation-states such as the USA, UK and Israel in the contemporary period 3 involves not just the deployment of the techniques of the new military urbanism in foreign war zones but their diffusion and imitation through the securitization of Western urban life. As in the 19th century, D o w n l o a d e d
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GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 391 when European colonial nations imported fingerprinting, panoptic prisons and Hauss- mannian boulevard building through neigh- bourhoods of insurrection to domestic cities after first experimenting with them on colo- nized frontiers, colonial techniques today operate through what Michel Foucault (2003) termed colonial boomerang effects. 4 It should never be forgotten, Foucault (2003, p. 103) argued: that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself. In the contemporary period, the military urbanism is marked byand indeed, consti- tuted througha myriad of increasingly star- tling Foucauldian boomerang effects. For example, Israeli drones designed to vertically subjugate and target Palestinians are now routinely deployed by police forces in North America, Europe and East Asia. Private oper- ators of US supermax prisons are heavily involved in running the global archipelago organizing incarceration and torture that has bourgeoned since the start of the war on terror. Private military corporations heavily colonize reconstruction contracts in both Iraq and New Orleans. Israeli expertise in population control is regularly sought by those planning security operations for major summits and sporting events. And shoot to kill policies developed to confront risks of suicide bombing in Tel Aviv and Haifa have been adopted by police forces in Western cities (a process which directly led to the state killing of Jean Charles de Menezes by London anti-terrorist police on 22 July 2005). Meanwhile, aggressive and militarized policing against public demonstrations and social mobilizations in London, Toronto, Paris or New York now utilize the same non-lethal weapons as Israels army in Gaza or Jenin. Constructions of security zones around the strategic financial cores of London and New York echo the techniques used in Baghdads Green Zone. And many of the techniques used to fortify enclaves in Baghdad or the West Bank are being sold around the world as leading-edge and combat-proven security solutions by corporate coalitions linking Israeli, US and other companies and states. Crucially, such boomerang effects linking security and military doctrine in the cities of the West with those on colonial peripheries are backed up by the cultural geographies which underpin the political right and far- right, along with hawkish commentators within Western militaries themselves. These tend to deem cities per se to be intrinsically problematic spacesthe main sites concen- trating acts of subversion, resistance, mobili- zation, dissent and protest challenging national security states. Bastions of ethno-nationalist politics, the burgeoning movements of the far right, often heavily represented within policing and state militaries, tend to see rural or exurban areas as the authentic and pure spaces of white nationalism linked to Christian traditions. Examples here range from US Christian Fundamentalists, through the British National Party to Austrias Freedom Party, the French National Front and Italys Forza Italia. The fast-growing and sprawling cosmopolitan neighbourhoods of the Wests cities, meanwhile, are often cast by such groups in the same Orientalist terms as the mega-cities of the Global South, as places radically external to the vulnerable nation threatening or enemy territories every bit as foreign as Baghdad or Gaza. Paradoxically, the imaginations of geogra- phy which underpin the new military urban- ism tend to treat colonial frontiers and Western homelands as fundamentally sepa- rate domainsclashes of civilizations in Samuel Huntingtons incendiary proposition D o w n l o a d e d
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392 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4 (1998)even as the security, military and intelligence doctrine addressing both increas- ingly fuses. Such imaginations of geography work to deny the ways in which the cities in both domains are increasingly linked by migration and investment flows to constitute each other. In rendering all mixed-up cities as prob- lematic spaces beyond the rural or exurban heartlands of authentic national communi- ties, telling movements in representations of cities occur between colonial peripheries and capitalist heartlands. The construction of sectarian enclaves modelled on Israeli prac- tice by US forces in Baghdad from 2003, for example, was widely described by US secu- rity personnel as the development of US- style gated communities in the country. In the aftermath of the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in late 2005, meanwhile, US Army Officers talked of the need to take back the City from Iraqi-style insurgents. As ever, then, the imaginations of urban life in colonized zones interact powerfully with that in the cities of the colonizers. Indeed, the projection of colonial tropes and security exemplars into postcolonial metro- poles in capitalist heartlands is fuelled by a new inner city Orientalism (Howell and Shryock, 2003). This relies on the widespread depiction amongst rightist security or mili- tary commentators of immigrant districts within the Wests cities as backward zones threatening the body politic of the Western city and nation. In France, for example, post- war state planning worked to conceptualize the mass, peripheral housing projects of the banlieues as near peripheral reservations attached to, but distant from, the countrys metropolitan centres (Kipfer and Goonewar- dena, 2007). Bitter memories of the Algerian and other anti-colonial wars saturate the French far-rights discourse about waning white power and the insecurity caused by the banlieuesa process that has led to a dramatic mobilization of state security forces in and around the main immigrant housing complexes. Discussing the shift from external to inter- nal colonization in France, Kristin Ross (1996) points to the way in which France now distances itself from its (former) colo- nies, both within and without. This func- tions, she continues, through a great cordoning off of the immigrants, their removal to the suburbs in a massive rework- ing of the social boundaries of Paris and other French cities (Ross, 1996, p. 12). The 2005 riots were only the latest in a long line of reactions towards the increasing militari- zation and securitization of this form of internal colonization and enforced peripher- ality within what Mustafa Dike (2007) has called the badlands of the contemporary French Republic. 5 Indeed, such is the contemporary rights conflation of terrorism and migration that simple acts of migration are now often being deemed to be little more than acts of warfare. This discursive shift has been termed the weaponization of migration (Cato, 2008) the shift away from emphases on moral obli- gations to offer hospitality to refugees toward criminalizing or dehumanizing migrants bodies as weapons against purport- edly homogenous and ethno-nationalist bases of national power. Here the latest debates about asymmetric, irregular or low intensity war, where nothing can be defined outside of boundless and never-ending definitions of political violence, blur uncomfortably into the grow- ing clamour of demonization by right and far-right commentators of the Wests diasporic and increasingly cosmopolitan cities. Samuel Huntington (2005), taking his clash of civilizations thesis (1998) further, now argues that the very fabric of US power and national identity is under threat not just because of global Islamist terrorism but because non-white and especially Latino groups are colonizing, and dominating, US metropolitan areas. Adopting such Manichean imaginations of the world, US military theorist William Lind (2004) has argued that prosaic acts of immi- gration from the Global South to the Norths D o w n l o a d e d
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GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 393 cities must now be understood as acts of warfare. In Fourth Generation war, Lind writes, invasion by immigration can be at least as dangerous as invasion by a state army. Under what he calls the poisonous ideology of multiculturalism, Lind argues that migrants within Western nations can now launch a homegrown variety of Fourth Generation war, which is by far the most dangerous kind. Given the two-way movement of the exemplars of the new military urbanism between Western cities and those on colonial frontiers, fuelled by the instinctive anti- urbanism of national security states, it is no surprise that cities in both domains are start- ing to display startling similarities as well as their more obvious differences. In both, hard, military-style borders, fences and checkpoints around defended enclaves and security zones, superimposed on the wider and more open city, are proliferating. Jersey-barrier blast walls, identity check- points, computerized CCTV, biometric surveillance and military styles of access control protect archipelagos of fortified enclaves from an outside deemed unruly, impoverished or dangerous. In the former case, these encompass green zones, war pris- ons, ethnic and sectarian neighbourhoods and military bases; in the latter they are growing around strategic financial districts, embassy zones, tourist spaces, airport and port complexes, sport event spaces, gated communities and export processing zones. In both domains, efforts to identify urban populations are linked with similar systems of surveillance, tracking and targeting dangerous bodies amidst the mass of urban life. We thus see parallel deployments of high-tech satellites, drones, intelligent closed circuit TV, non-lethal weaponry and biometric surveillance in the very different contexts of cities at home and abroad. And in both domains, finally, there is a similar sense that new doctrines of perpetual war are being used to permanently treat all urban residents as perpetual targets whose benign nature, rather than being assumed, now needs to be continually demonstrated to complex archi- tectures of surveillance or data mining as the subject moves around the city. Such moves are backed by parallel legal suspensions targeting groups deemed threatening with special restrictions, pre-emptive arrests or a priori incarceration within globe-straddling extra-legal torture camps and gulags. Whilst these various archipelagos of enclaves function in a wide variety of ways they are similar in that they replace urban traditions of open access with security systems that force people to prove legitimacy as they gain access. Urban theorists and philosophers now wonder whether the possibilities of the city as a key political foundation for dissent and collective mobili- zation within civil society are being replaced by complex geographies made up of various systems of enclaves and camps which link together whilst withdrawing from the urban outside beyond the walls or access-control systems (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Diken and Laustsen, 2005, p. 64). In such a context one wonders whether urban securitization might reach a level in the future which would effectively decouple the strategic economic role of cities as drivers of capital accumulation from their historic role as centres for the mobilization of democratic dissent. Surveillant economy What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century [security], now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation. (Agamben, 2002, pp. 12) Turning to the new military urbanisms third pillarits political economyit is important to stress that the colonization of urban think- ing and practice by militarized ideas of secu- rity does not have a single source. In fact, it emanates from a complex range of sources. These encompass sprawling, transnational industrial complexes fusing military and D o w n l o a d e d
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394 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4 security companies with technology, surveil- lance and entertainment ones; a wide range of consultants and industries who sell security solutions as silver bullets to complex social problems; and a complex mass of security and military thinkers who now argue that war and political violence centres over- whelmingly on the everyday spaces and circuits of urban life cities. As vague and all-encompassing ideas about security creep to infect virtually all aspects of public policy and social life (Agamben, 2002), so these emerging industrialsecurity complexes work together on the highly lucra- tive challenges of perpetually targeting every- day activities, spaces and behaviours in cities and the circulations which link them together. The proliferation of wars sustaining perma- nent mobilization and pre-emptive, ubiqui- tous surveillance within and beyond territorial borders means that the imperative of security now imposes itself of the basic principle of state activity (Agamben, 2002, pp. 12). Amidst global economic collapse, markets for security services and technologies, which overlay military-style systems of command, control and targeting over the everyday spaces and systems of civilian life, are booming like never before. It is no acci- dent that securityindustrial complexes blos- som in parallel with the diffusion of market fundamentalist notions of organizing social, economic and political life. The hyper- inequalities and urban militarization and securitization sustained by neoliberalization are mutually reinforcing. In a discussion of the US states response to the Katrina disas- ter, Henry Giroux (2006, p. 172) points out that the normalization of market fundamen- talism in US culture has made it much more difficult to translate private woes into social issues and collective action or to insist on a language of the public good. He argues that the evisceration of all notions of sociality in this case has led to a sense of total abandon- ment, resulting in fear, anxiety, and insecu- rity over ones future. International expenditure on homeland security now surpasses established enterprises like movie-making and the music industry in annual revenues (Economic Times, 2007). Homeland Security Research Corp. point out that the worldwide total defense outlay (military, intelligence community, and Homeland Security/Homeland Defense) is forecasted to grow by approximately 50%, from $1,400 billion in 2006 to $2,054 billion by 2015. By 2005, US defence expenditure alone had reached $420 billion a year comparable to the rest of the world combined. Over a quarter of this was devoted to purchas- ing services from a rapidly expanding market of private military corporations. By 2010, such mercenary groups are in line to receive a staggering $202 billion from the US state alone (Schreier and Caparini, 2005). Meanwhile, worldwide Homeland Secu- rity spending outlay is forecasted to grow by nearly 100%, from $231 billion in 2006 to $518 billion by 2015. Where the homeland security outlay was 12% of the worlds total defence outlay in 2003, it is expected to become 25% of the total defence outlay by 2015. 6 Even more meteoric growth is expected in some of the key sectors of the new control technologies. Global markets in biometric technology, for example, are expected to increase from the small base of $1.5 billion in 2005 to $5.7 billion by 2010. 7 Crucially, as the Raytheon example demonstrates, the same constellations of security companies are often involved in selling, establishing and operating the tech- niques and practices of the new military urbanism in both war-zone and homeland cities. Often, as with the EUs new security policies, states or supranational blocks are bringing in high-tech and militarized means of tracking illegal immigrants not because they are necessarily the best means of address- ing their security concerns but because such policies might help stimulate their defence, security or technology companies to compete in booming global markets for security technology. Moreover, Israeli experience in locking down its cities whilst turning the Occupied Territories into permanent, urban prison camps, is proving especially influential D o w n l o a d e d
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GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 395 as a source of combat proven exemplars to be imitated around the world (Klein, 2007). The new high-tech border fence between the USA and Mexico, for example, is being built by a consortium linking Boeing to the Israeli company Elbit whose radar and targeting technologies have been honed in the perma- nent lock-down of Palestinian urban life into highly militarized enclaves (Catterall, 2009). It is also startling how much US counterinsur- gency strategies in Iraq have explicitly been based on efforts to effectively scale-up Israeli treatment of the Palestinians during the second Intifada. The political economies sustaining the new military urbanism inevitably centre on cities as the main production centres of neoliberal capitalism as well as the main arenas and markets for rolling out new secu- rity solutions. The worlds major financial centres, in particular, orchestrate global processes of militarization and securitiza- tion. They house the headquarters of global security, technology and military corpora- tions, provide the locations for the worlds biggest technological corporate universities, which dominate research and development in new security technologies and support the global network of financial institutions which so often work to violently erase or appropriate cities and resources in colonized lands in the name of neoliberal economics and free trade. The network of so-called global cities through which neoliberal capitalism is orchestratedLondon, New York, Paris, Frankfurt and so onthus helps to directly produce new logics of aggressive colonial acquisition and dispossession by multina- tional capital working closely with state mili- taries and private military operators. With the easing of state monopolies on violence, and the proliferation of acquisitive private military and mercenary corporations, so the brutal Urbicidal violence and dispos- session that so often helps bolster the parasitic aspects of Western city economies, and feeds contemporary corporate capitalism, is more apparent than ever (Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2007). In a world increasingly haunted by the spectre of imminent resource exhaustion, the new military urbanism is also linked intimately with the neo-colonial exploitation of distant resources to try and sustain richer cities and urban lifestyles. New York and London provide the financial and corporate power through which Iraqi oil reserves have been reappropriated by Western oil companies since the 2003 invasion. Neo-colonial land-grabs to grow biofuels for cars or future food for increasingly precarious urban populations of the rich North in the poor countries of the Global South are also organized through global commodity markets centred on the worlds major financial cities. Finally, the rapid global growth in markets for high-tech security is itself providing a major boost to global financial cities in times of global economic meltdown. Urban Achilles If you want to destroy someone nowadays, you go after their infrastructure. (Agre, 2001, p. 1) As I have detailed in a previous article for City (Graham, 2005), the new military urbanisms penultimate pillar rests on the way that the everyday architectures and infrastructures of citiesthe structures and mechanisms that support modern urban lifeare now being appropriated by state militaries and non-state fighters as primary means of waging war and amplifying politi- cal violence. The very conditions of the modern, globalized cityits reliance on dense webs of infrastructure, its density and anonymity, its dependence on imported water, food and energythus create the possibilities of violence against it, and, crucially, through it. The intensively networked and distanciated nature of contemporary urbanism provides the Achil- les heel when the everyday sites and spaces of cities are transformed into the key battlespaces of asymmetric or irregular D o w n l o a d e d
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396 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4 warfare. Urban everyday life everywhere is thus stalked by ambient threats of interrup- tion operating through webs of infrastruc- ture: the blackout, the gridlock, the severed connection, the technical malfunction, the inhibited flow, the network unavailable sign. The potential for catastrophic violence against cities and urban life has changed in parallel with the shift of urban life towards ever-greater reliance on modern infrastruc- tures. The result of this is that the everyday infrastructures of urban lifehighways, metro trains, computer networks, water and sanitation systems, electricity grids, airlin- ersmay be easily assaulted and turned into agents either of instantaneous terror, debili- tating disruption, even demodernization. Increasingly, then, in high-tech societies dominated by socially abstract interconnec- tions and circulations, both high-tech warfare and terrorism targets the means of life, not combatants (Hinkson, 2005, pp. 145146). As John Robb (2007) puts it: most of the networks that we rely on for city lifecommunications, electricity, transportation, waterare extremely vulnerable to intentional disruptions. In practice, this means that a very small number of attacks on the critical hubs of an [infrastructure] network can collapse the entire network. Many recent examples demonstrate how non-state actors now gain much of their power by appropriating the technical infra- structure necessary to sustain modern, globalized urban life in order to project, and massively amplify, the power of their politi- cal violence. Insurgents use the citys infra- structure to attack New York, London, Madrid or Mumbai. Insurgents disrupt elec- tricity networks, oil pipelines or mobile phone systems in Iraq, Nigeria and else- where. Somali pirates systematically hijack- ing global shipping routes have even been shown to be using spies in Londons ship- ping brokers to provide intelligence for their attacks. In doing so, such actors can get by with the most basic of weapons, transforming airliners, metro trains, cars, mobile phones, electricity and communications grids, or small boats, into deadly devices. However, such threats of infrastructural terrorism, while very real and important, pale beside the much less visible efforts of state militaries to target the essential infra- structure that makes modern urban life possible. The US and Israeli forces, for exam- ple, have long worked to systematically demodernize entire urban societies through the destruction of the life-support and infra- structure systems of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon or Iraq since 1991. States have thus replaced total war against cities with the systematic destruction of water and electric- ity systems with weaponssuch as bombs which rain down millions of graphite spools to short-circuit electricity stationsdesigned especially for this task. Ostensibly means of bringing unbearable political pressure on adversary regimes, such purportedly humanitarian modes of war end up killing the sick, the ill and the old almost as effectively as carpet bombing, but beyond the capricious gaze of the media. Such wars on public health are engineered through the deliberate generation of public health crises in highly urbanized societies where no infrastructural alternatives to modern water, sewerage, power, medical and food supplies exist. The devastating Israeli siege of Gaza since Hamas were elected there in 2006 is another powerful example here. This has transformed a dense urban corridor, with 1.5 million people squeezed into an area the size of the Isle of Wight, into a vast prison camp. Within this the weak, the old, the young and sick die invisibly in startling numbers beyond the capricious gaze of the mainstream media. Everyone else is forced to live something approaching what Georgio Agamben (1998) has called bare lifea biological existence which can be sacrificed at any time by a colonial power which maintains the right to kill with impunity but has withdrawn all moral, political or human responsibilities for the population. D o w n l o a d e d
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GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 397 Increasingly, such formal infrastructural war, based on the severing of the lines of supply which continually work to bring modern urban life into its very existence as a means of political coercion, blurs seamlessly into economic competition and energy geopolitics. Putins resurgent Russia, for example, these days gains much of its strate- gic power not through formal military deployments but by its continued threats to switch off the energy supplies of Europes cities at a stroke. The systematic demodernization of highly urbanized societies through air power is justified by air power theory, which exists as the dark shadow of long-discredited modernization theory. This suggests that societal progress can be reversed, pushing societies back towards increasingly primi- tive states. Thomas Friedman, for example, deployed such arguments as NATO cranked up its bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999. Picking up a variety of historic dates that could be the future destiny of Serbian society, post bombing, Friedman urged that all of the movements and mobilities sustain- ing urban life in Serbian cities should be brought to a grinding halt. It should be lights out in Belgrade, he said. Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted []. We will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do that, too! (cited in Skoric, 1999). In Friedmans scenario, the precise reversal of time that the adversary society is to be bombed back through is presumably a matter merely of the correct weapon and target selection. The politics of seeing the bombing of infra- structure as a form of reversed modernization plays a much wider discursive role. It also does much to sustain and bolster the long- standing depiction of countries deemed less developed, along some putatively linear line of modernization, as pathologically back- ward, intrinsically barbarian, unmodern, even savage. Aerial bombing aimed at demodern- ization thus works to reinforce Orientalist imaginations which relegate the savage, colonized target population to an other time and space (Deer, 2007, p. 3). Indeed, Nils Gilman (2003, p. 199) has argued that, as long as modernization was conceived as a unitary and unidirectional process of economic expansion, it would be possible to explain backwardness and insurgency only in terms of deviance and pathology. At its heart, then, the systematic demod- ernization of whole societies in the name of fighting terror involves a darkly ironic and self-fulfilling prophecy. As Derek Gregory (2004) has argued, drawing on Georgio Agambens ideas (1998), the demoderniza- tion of entire Middle Eastern cities and soci- eties, through both the Israeli wars against Lebanon and the Palestinians, and the US war on terror, are both fuelled by similar Orientalist discourses. These revivify long- standing tropes and work by casting out ordinary civilians and their citieswhether they be in Kabul, Baghdad or Nablusso that they are placed beyond the privileges and protections of the law so that their lives (and deaths) [are] rendered of no account (Gregory, 2003, p. 311). Here, then, beyond the increasingly fortified homeland, sover- eignty works by abandoning subjects, reduc- ing them to bare life (Diken and Laustsen, 2002, original emphasis). Citizen-soldiers All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thingwar. (Benjamin, 1968, p. 241) 8 The final key pillar sustaining the new mili- tary urbanism is the way it gains much of its power and legitimacy by fusing seamlessly with militarized veins of popular, urban and material culture. Very often, for example, military ideas of tracking, surveillance and targeting do not require completely new systems. Instead, they simply appropriate the systems of high-tech consumption that have been laid out within and through cities to D o w n l o a d e d
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398 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4 sustain the latest means of digitally organized travel and consumption. Thus, as in central London, congestion-charging zones thus quickly morph into security zones. Internet interactions and transactions provide the basis for data mining to root out suppos- edly threatening behaviours. Dreams of smart and intelligent cars blur with those of robotic weapons systems. Satellite imagery and GPS support new styles of civilian urban life as well as precision urban bombing. And, as in the new security initiative in Lower Manhattan, CCTV cameras designed to make shoppers feel secure are transformed into anti-terrorist screens. Perhaps the most powerful series of civil- ianmilitary crossovers at the heart of the new military urbanism, however, are being forged within cultures of virtual and electronic enter- tainment and corporate news. Here, to tempt in the nimble-fingered recruits best able to control the latest high-tech drones and weap- onry, the US military produces some of the most popular urban warfare consumer video games. Highly successful games like the US Armys Americas Army or US Marines Full Spectrum Warrior 9 allow players to slay terrorists in fictionalized and Orientalized cities in frameworks based directly on those of the US militarys own training systems. The main purpose of these games, however, is public relations: they are a powerful and extremely cost-effective means of recruitment. Because the Pentagon spends around $15,000 on average wooing each recruit, the game needs only to result in 300 enlistments per year to recoup costs (Stahl, 2006, p. 123). Forty per cent of those who join the Army have previously played the game (Stahl, 2006, p. 123). The game also provides the basis for a sophisticated surveil- lance system through which Army recruit- ment efforts are directed and targeted. In the marketing speak of its military developers, Americas Army is designed to reach the substantial overlap in population between the gaming population & the armys target recruiting segments. It addresses tech-savvy audiences and afford the army a unique, strategic communication advantage (Lenoir, n.d.). To close the circle between virtual enter- tainment and virtual killing, control panels for the latest US weapons systemssuch as the latest control stations for pilots or armed Predator drones, manufactured by our old friends Raytheon (see Figure 1(b))now directly imitate the consoles of Playstation2s, which are, after all, most familiar to recruits. The newest Predator control systems from Raytheonleading manufacturer of assassi- nation drones as well as key player in the UKs E-borders consortiumdeliberately use the same HOTAS [hands on stick and throttle] system on a [ ] video game. Raytheons UAV designer argues that theres no point in re-inventing the wheel. The current generation of pilots was raised on the [Sony] Playstation, so we created an interface that they will immediately under- stand (Richfield, 2006). Added to this, many of the latest video games actually depict the very same armed drones as those used in assassination raids by US forces. 10 Wired magazine, talking to one Predator pilot, Private Joe Clark, about this experi- ence directing drone assassinations from a virtual reality cave on the edge of Las Vegas, points out that he has, in a sense been prep- ping for the job since he was a kid: He plays videogames. A lot of videogames. Back in the barracks he spends downtime with an Xbox and a PlayStation. After his training, when he first slid behind the controls of a Shadow [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] UAV, the point and click operation turned out to work much the same way. You watch the screen. You tell it to roll left, it rolls left. Its pretty simple, Clark says (Shachtman, 2005). Projecting such trends, Bryan Finoki spec- ulates about a near-future where video games become the ultimate interface for conducting real life warfare, as virtual reality simulators used in video gaming converge completely with those used in military train- ing and exercises. Finoki takes the video game-like existence of the Las Vegas Predator pilots, with their Playstation-style controls D o w n l o a d e d
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GRAHAM: CITIES AS BATTLESPACE 399 as his starting point. He speculates, only half ironically, whether future video gamers could become decorated war heroes by virtue of their eye-and-hand coordination skills, which would eventually dominate the trig- gers of network-centric remote controlled warfare? 11 A final vital circuit of militarization linking urban and popular culture in domestic cities to colonial violence in occupied ones centres on the militarization of car culture. This particular link is most powerfully symbolized by the rise of explicitly militarized Sports Utility Vehicles, especially in the USA (Mendietta, 2005). The rise and fall of the Hummer is an especially pivotal example here. Here, US military vehicles for urban warfare have been directly modified as hyper- aggressive civilian vehicles marketed as patri- otic embodiments of the war on terror. With names like Tracker, Equinox, Freestyle, Escape, Defender, Trail Blazer, Navigator, Pathfinder, and Warrior, David Campbell (2005, p. 958) writes, SUVs popu- late the crowded urban routes of daily life with representations of the militarized fron- tier. Crucial here are the ways in which mili- tarized urban automobile cultures help to materialize and territorialize the separation of the domestic city lying inside the home- space of the US or Western nation or city, from the borderlands cursed with the ongo- ing resource wars surrounding oil exploita- tion. Such borderlands, Campbell (2005, p. 945) continues, are conventionally under- stood as distant, wild places of insecurity where foreign intervention will be necessary to ensure domestic interests are secured. Far from enriching local populations, dominant means of organizing exploitation and pipelines actually work to further marginal- ize impoverished indigenous communities, ratcheting up insecurity and violence in the process. The destiny of such people and places is thus violently subsumed by the privilege accorded a resource (oil) that is central to the American way of life, the secu- rity of which is regarded as a fundamental strategic issue (Campbell, 2005, p. 945). Synoptic politics The city [is] not just the site, but the very medium of warfarea flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux. (Weizman, 2005, p. 53) The power of the new military urbanism thesis is that it forces together sites and circuits of militarization that are usually scrutinized in isolation. It achieves this, moreover, by attending to the visceral and material transformations across everyday urban life rather than the abstractions of geopolitics and international relations. Finally, it attends to the fundamental connec- tions in the contemporary world between cities and urbanization on the one hand and questions of state and non-state political violence on the other. In encompassing the ways in which tech- nophiliac dreams of control and omniscience blend with Foucauldian boomerang effects, political economies of security, projections of political violence through the infrastruc- tural circuits of cities, and the militarization of popular, electronic, material and automo- bile culture, the new military urbanism thesis reveals with unprecedented clarity how pernicious circuits of militarization operate across a broad swathe. The ways in which the new military urbanism works to colonize the everyday spaces and sites of city life, under all-embracing paradigms that project life itself to be little but war, and within a bound- less and unending battlespace, emerge starkly. Many contemporary military and secu- rity theories and doctrines now conclude that war is now everywhere and every- thing. It is large and small. It has no bound- aries in time and space. Life itself is war (Agre, 2001). Working though xenophobic and deeply anti-urban views of the world, which continuously telescope between conventional NorthSouth binaries, such perspectives see the world through techno- philiac cross-hairs; they automatically trans- late difference into othering, othering into D o w n l o a d e d
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400 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 4 targeting, and targeting into violence. Such logics, moreover, have been shown to be constituted through circuits of popular culture, from car culture to video games, film and science fiction, through to the deepening crossovers between war, entertainment and weapon design. What emerges is a stark chal- lenge to all those concerned with the right to the city, and the future of democratic urban life, at the start of this quintessentially urban century. For the challenge now is to forge a synoptic and multifaceted politics, which itself embraces highly fluid new media technologies and telescopes across global NorthSouth divides, to systematically erode the key pillars of the new military urbanism. Such a politics, though, must engage first with the ways in which ideas of an urban public domain must move beyond traditional notions that they encompass both media content and geographical spaces exempt from proprietary control which combine to form our common aesthetic, cultural and intellec- tual landscape (Zimmermann, 2007). Rather than permanent, protected zones of urbanity or publicness, organized hierarchically by key gatekeepers, transnational urban life is now characterized by constantly emerging public domains which are highly fluid, plural- ized and organized by interaction between many producers and consumers (Zimmer- mann, 2007). The new public domains, through which challenges to the new military urbanism can be sustained, must forge collab- orations and connections across distance and difference. They must materialize new publics, and create new countergeographic spaces. Ironically, they must use the very same media and control technologies that the mili- taries, and the transnational architecture of security states, are using so perniciously in their attempts to pre-emptively lock-down democratic politics (Zimmermann, 2007). Notes 1 1 Major David Pendall (2004) of the US Army writes that friendly cyber or virtual operations live on the same networks and systems as adversaries networks and systems. In most cases, both use the same protocols, infrastructures, and platforms. They can quickly turn any space into a battlespace. 2 2 See http://www.northcom.mil/ 3 3 See Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004; David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 4 4 On the panopticon, see Mitchell (2000). On Hausmannian planning, see Weizman (2003). And on fingerprinting, see Sengoopta (2003). 5 5 See also Ross (1996, pp. 151155). 6 6 Source: Homeland Security Research Corp., 2007, at www.photonicsleadership.org.uk/files/ MarketResearch_DefenceSecurity.doc 7 7 Source: Homeland Security Research Corp., 2007, at www.photonicsleadership.org.uk/ 8 8 Thanks to Marcus Power for this reference. 9 9 See http://www.americasarmy.com/ and http:// www.fullspectrumwarrior.com/ respectively. 10 10 One example here is the game, Battlefield 2, see Quilty-Harper (2006). 11 11 See War Room, Subtopia Blog, 20 May 2006, at http://subtopia.blogspot.com/2006/05/war- room_20.html References Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2002) Security and terror, Theory and Event 5(4), pp. 12. Agre, P. (2001) Imagining the next war: infrastructural warfare and the conditions of democracy, Radical Urban Theory,14 September, http://www.rut.com/ 911/Phil-Agre.html Amoore, L. (2009) Algorithmic war: everyday geographies of the war on terror, Antipode 41(1), pp. 4969. Benjamin, W. (1968) The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, in H. Arendt (ed.) Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn, pp. 217252. New York: Schocken. Blackmore, T. (2005) War X: Human Extensions in Battlespace. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Campbell, D. (2005) The biopolitics of security: oil, empire, and the sports utility vehicle, American Quarterly 57(3), pp. 943997. Cato (2008) The Weaponization of Immigration. Center for Immigration Studies, February, http:// www.cis.org/weaponization_of_immigration.html Catterall, B. (2009) Is it all coming together? Thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis: (15) elite squads: Brazil, Prague, Gaza and beyond, City 13(1), pp. 159171. Chow, R. (2006) The Age of the World Target: Self- Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. D o w n l o a d e d
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CITY Taylor and Francis CCIT_A_GN156975.sgm 10.1080/ City 1360-4813 (print)/1470-3629 (online) Original Article 2009 Taylor & Francis 13 4000000 December 2009 VOLUME 13 NUMBER 4 DECEMBER 2009 EDITORIAL 379 Articles CITIES AS BATTLESPACE: THE NEW MILITARY URBANISM Stephen Graham 383 TRANSPARENT CITIES: RE-SHAPING THE URBAN EXPERIENCE THROUGH INTERACTIVE VIDEO GAME SIMULATION Rowland Atkinson and Paul Willis 403 NEO-URBANISM IN THE MAKING UNDER CHINAS MARKET TRANSITION Fulong Wu 418 PROBING THE SYMPTOMATIC SILENCES OF MIDDLE-CLASS SETTLEMENT: A CASE STUDY OF GENTRIFICATION PROCESSES IN GLASGOW Kirsteen Paton 432 URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND SMALL PLACES: SLOW CITIES AS SITES OF ACTIVISM Sarah Pink 451 Cities for People, Not for Profit: background and comments EDITORS INTRODUCTION 466 PETER MARCUSE AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY: INTRODUCTION TO THE KEYNOTE LECTURE BY PETER MARCUSE Bruno Flierl 471 RESCUING THE RIGHT TO THE CITY Martin Woessner 474 THE NEW MIKADO? TOM SLATER, GENTRIFICATION AND DISPLACEMENT Chris Hamnett 476 CITIES FOR PEOPLE, NOT FOR PROFITFROM A RADICAL-LIBERTARIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE Marcelo Lopes de Souza 483 CITIES AFTER OIL (ONE MORE TIME) Adrian Atkinson 493 D o w n l o a d e d
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Debates THE BANTUSTAN SUBLIME: REFRAMING THE COLONIAL IN RAMALLAH Nasser Abourahme 499 Scenes & Sounds CHICAGO FADE: PUTTING THE RESEARCHERS BODY BACK INTO PLAY Loc Wacquant 510 Reviews THINKING THE URBAN: ON RECENT WRITINGS ON PHILOSOPHY AND THE CITY Philosophy and the City: Classical to Contemporary Writings, edited by Sharon M. Meagher Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory, by Eduardo Mendieta Reviewed by David Cunningham 517 Endpiece IS IT ALL COMING TOGETHER? THOUGHTS ON URBAN STUDIES AND THE PRESENT CRISIS: (16) COMRADES AGAINST THE COUNTERREVOLUTIONS: BRINGING PEOPLE (BACK?) IN Bob Catterall 531 Volume Content and Author Index 551 D o w n l o a d e d
Huw Bennett (2007), "The Mau Mau Emergency as Part of the British Army's Post-War Counter- Insurgency Experience", Defense & Security Analysis, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 143–163. DOI: 10.1080/14751790701424705