Towards a Global Urban Geopolitics: Inhabiting Violence

Over a 50-year span, Institute of Development Studies (IDS) research has not focused on cities or urbanisation to the extent it might have. We find that there is good reason for cities to now be described as the ‘new frontier’ for international development. In particular, violence is increasingly a defining characteristic of urban living in both conflict and non-conflict settings. This has important consequences for the relatively under-researched links between urban violence, the processes of state building, and wider development goals. Benefiting from key IDS contributions to the debates on the security–development nexus, citizenship and the hybrid nature of the governance landscape, we argue that the moment is opportune for the Institute to deepen its research and policy expertise on urban violence ‘in the vernacular’.

2004

“Whilst the Palestinian suicide bomber is rightly condemned for killing and maiming civilians with his or her homemade nail bomb, Israel's supreme court upholds the use of the flechette shell, with which Israel kills and maims civilians in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places in the world. These shells, shot from tanks, are packed with thousands of tiny steel darts that spray in a 'kill radius' some 300 meters long and 90 meters wide. Israeli flechette or Palestinian nail bomb: what is the difference again?”(Clark, 2003, 34).

Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 2019

The world is urbanising rapidly and cities are increasingly held as the most important arenas for sustainable development. Cities emerging from war are no exception, but across the globe, many postwar cities are ravaged by residual or renewed violence, which threatens progress towards peace and stability. This collection of articles addresses why such violence happens, where and how it manifests, and how it can be prevented. It includes contributions that are informed by both postwar logics and urban particularities, that take intra-city dynamics into account, and that adopt a spatial analysis of the city. By bringing together contributions from different disciplinary backgrounds, all addressing the single issue of postwar violence in cities from a spatial perspective, the articles make a threefold contribution to the research agenda on violence in postwar cities. First, the articles nuance our understanding of the causes and forms of the uneven spatial distribution of violence, insecurities, and trauma within and across postwar cities. Second, the articles demonstrate how urban planning and the built environment shape and generate different forms of violence in postwar cities. Third, the articles explore the challenges, opportunities, and potential unintended consequences of conflict resolution in violent urban settings.

Urbanization and Development, 2010

Cities generally … comprise a motley of peoples and cultures, of highly differentiated modes of life between which there often is only the faintest communication, the greatest indifference, … occasionally bitter strife, but always the sharpest contrast. (Wirth 1938: 20) As the world moves towards its so-called urban 'tipping point', urbanization in the global South has increasingly come to be portrayed as the portent of a dystopian future characterized by ever-mounting levels of anarchy and brutality. The association between cities, violence, and disorder is not new, however. In a classic article on…/

Peacebuilding , 2023

This special issue explores geographies of peace in violently contested cities – cities where the socio-political order is contested by actors who use violence and repression to either challenge or reinforce the prevailing distribution of power and political, economic, and social control. The articles within the special issue theorise and explore where, when, how, and why urban conflicts manifest themselves in the context of contested cities. Together, they also uncover strategies and mechanisms that can break dynamics of violence and repression, lead to urban coexistence, and generate peaceful relations in cities, grounding their analyses in rich case studies of different violently contested cities. The special issue thereby advances the research front on violently contested cities by studying their previously underexplored constructive potential. Bringing together different disciplinary perspectives, the special issue speaks to broader issues of conflicted and conflict-driven urbanisation, political violence in cities, and wider processes of urban change.

Spatial contexts are not just a backdrop to violence. The transgression, penetration, destruction and defence of territorial boundaries is at the heart of organised violence and struggles for political control. Despite this, and despite the pronounced spatial turn in the social sciences in recent decades (Auyero 2006; Gieryn 2000; Massey 1992), spatial contexts are neglected in much of the literature on political violence. Among the most important factors contributing to the marginalisation of spatial issues and the relatively underdeveloped theorisation of space in the literature on political violence is the strong focus on the characteristics of individuals and the structure of organisations, and the practice of analysing violence through large-N comparative studies that treat sovereign states as unproblematic units of analysis

Geopolitics, 2022

Connecting urban geopolitics with critical geopolitics, this article highlights the urban geopolitical significance of learning from the European Southeast. Urban geopolitics has often made reference to the European Southeast in discussions of urban warfare, conflict and contestation. In particular, Sarajevo and discussions of urbicide played a seminal role in understanding the contemporary relationship between conflict and the built environment. Beyond this attention to the 1990s wars, this article shows that contemporary urban transformations in the region reflect novel processes and alignments that can contribute to the larger project of rethinking urban geopolitics: allegedly ‘contested’ and ‘ordinary’ cities in the region reflect today a reshaping of practices of material and immaterial urban geopolitics highlighting transnational and global entanglements beyond the East-West and North-South conceptual and geopolitical divides. By employing a critical geopolitical analysis of the urban, the article discusses performative acts of power in urban space and the reconfiguration of the built environment in two cities in the region as a nexus of geopolitical processes, well beyond the wars of the 1990s: Sarajevo, arguably a divided city in a contested state, and Belgrade, an ‘ordinary’ capital city of a nation-state, albeit uncontested capital of a country with contested territories. The article highlights the emergence of newer relationships beyond the East-West divide, particularly with the Middle East, specifically articulated through urban space reconfigurations. It shows how the European South-East reflects that the urban geopolitical goes beyond the usual lens of ‘contested’ urban space to ‘ordinary’ cities, which become arenas of multi-scalar geopolitics.

As the global population is increasing – especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America – and ever more people are moving to cities, urbanisation is shaping the security environment. Although urbanisation is often associated with higher levels of socio-economic development and prosperity, the phenomenon also creates societal problems, particularly when combined with rapid population growth. Fast-paced, unmanaged and poorly serviced urbanisation generates an array of infrastructural, economic, social and security challenges. These problems are most apparent in slums and other informal settlements, where unofficial, often illicit governance and economic structures challenge the host state and licit economy. Many such areas become disputed territories: pockets of high-intensity armed activity in which governance challenges and the activities of non-state armed groups converge.

Policy makers must understand ethno-national conflicts and their management or resolution in terms of processes that span urban, regional, national and international levels. Trying to find or implement a solution at only one level may be severely limiting.