Postcard from Mumbai: Modern Urban Siege

Contexto Internacional

This article focuses on how urban security has been governed in Mumbai in the aftermath of the 2008 terrorist attacks (26/11). The event was widely cited as a major turning point in the securitisation and militarisation of Indian cities. It also produced significant political upheaval, which in turn generated calls for a major institutional overhaul of the governmental architecture for handling terrorism. This article takes the political and policy repercussions of 26/11 as an intervention into critical debates about the (para-)militarisation of policing and the politics of urban security. Here I shift the focus from the disciplinary and divisive effects of policies towards an emphasis on their spectacular and theatrical dimensions. If we are to make sense of the ‘militarised’ focus of the policy response to 26/11, I argue, we need to take seriously its populist, aspirational qualities.

Contexto Internacional: Journal of Global Connections , 2017

This article focuses on how urban security has been governed in Mumbai in the aftermath of the 2008 terrorist attacks (26/11). The event was widely cited as a major turning point in the securitisation and militarisation of Indian cities. It also produced significant political upheaval, which in turn generated calls for a major institutional overhaul of the governmental architecture for handling terrorism. This article takes the political and policy repercussions of 26/11 as an intervention into critical debates about the (para-)militarisation of policing and the politics of urban security. Here I shift the focus from the disciplinary and divisive effects of policies towards an emphasis on their spectacular and theatrical dimensions. If we are to make sense of the ‘militarised’ focus of the policy response to 26/11, I argue, we need to take seriously its populist, aspirational qualities.

Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 2009

When Mumbai became the target of terror in the 26/11 attack in 2008, the events in that city, like other tragic global events in recent years, were narrated through new media platforms. The increasing convergence of technologies and mobile telephony enabled new forms of gaze and the ability to bear witness through these new media technologies. The non-stop capture of events through recording equipment embedded in mobile phones and their connectivity to the World Wide Web constructed Mumbai through civilian narratives and images, and this phenomenon was described as the "coming of age of Twitter". Conversely the event raised fundamental questions about the role of broadcasting and protocols in live telecasts of terrorist attacks which have consequences for national security. In narrating the city through the civilian gaze and traditional media the spectacle of suffering in postmodernity becomes an open-ended exercise where the city is both a canvas for showcasing the risks of modernity and new forms of visibilities which emerge from social media and the "act of sharing" content on global platforms.

This article contributes to the growing literature on the spatial dynamics of urban violence in the developing world. It highlights the dialectic between urban form, violence and security provision as vernacular in nature, shaped by hyperlocal processes and actors. And yet, this dialectic is dominated by state and military-centred terminology, and continually underpinned by the state's imposition of order to constitute the city as a site for legitimate control. This materialises as the often arbitrary recognition of one area as 'at the margins' , and not another, as the recognition of one group of people as 'slum dwellers' or illegal residents, and not others, or as the recognition of some individuals as criminal, and not others. Using detailed case study material from a group of inner-city neighbourhoods in Mumbai, India, the article suggests that urban form in its physical, political and historical characterisations not only influences how vigilante protection operates, but also interacts in a non-benign manner with the mechanics by which the state endeavours to control violence. As such, it shapes who is vulnerable to violence, how vulnerable they are, and why. This speaks directly to the nature of security provision witnessed across the cities of the developing world.

Springer eBooks, 2018

Metropolitan Governance in Asia and the Pacific Rim

Urban security is a major challenge for cities across the globe. The attack on the Twin Trade Towers in New York City in September 2001 marked the start of a developing terrorist presence that physically and mentally affects the security and spirit of cities as safe places. This chapter presents the concept of “urban defensive” strategies for global cities as a way to frame the issue of public security. Governments face the challenge of introducing a defensive concept into urban fabrics without simultaneously violating the vibrancy of urban life. While this challenge seems universal, some complexities of urban life in Western society are not matched in many cities in Southeast Asia. This chapter analyses these issues from the perspectives of planning and design, and discusses them in the context of Jakarta, Indonesia.

For the first time in close to 100 years, India reports higher population growth in its urbanised areas than across its vast rural landscape. However, a confluence of vast urbanisation and scarcity of resources has implied heightened levels of localised violence, centred in and around already impoverished neighbourhoods. This therefore has a disproportionate impact in further marginalising poor communities, and is at odds with the notion that cities are incontestably and inevitably the context of sustained poverty eradication. And yet, we know relatively little about the mechanics of security provisioning in Indian cities at large. The central argument in this paper is that violent urban spaces have a profound impact on how safety and security are understood by the state as well as the urban poor, thereby redefining the parameters of adequate urban living. I look in detail at how the 1992-1993 riots in Mumbai unfolded in a group of inner-city neighbourhoods, and find that specific acts of brutality and violence during the riots continue to shape current understandings of the „safe city‟. In doing so, I also find that the nature and form of informal urban space affects the mechanics by which the state endeavours to control violence, while individual acts of public violence function as markers that legitimate the use of, and reliance on, extralegal forms of security provision.

Palgrave MacMillan, 2018

In this introduction, the collection’s editors offer critical readings of Omar Robert Hamilton’s debut novel, The City Always Wins (2017), alongside a number of other literary texts such, to open up and explicate the book’s orienting concept of ‘Planned Violence’. It situates the book in recent interdisciplinary work on infrastructures as both physical and aesthetic objects, and in commentaries on the relationship between the spatial layouts of post/colonial cities and the different kinds of violence to which they give rise. Throughout it further emphasises the resistant quality of literary and cultural production as a way to diagnose and counter the planned violence of urban infrastructures in the post/colonial city, which is one of the collection’s overarching efforts. It concludes with a summary overview of the book’s three sections, highlighting the relationships between the chapters and creative interludes that follow.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2003

The attacks of September 11th indicate a new kind of threat to urban security and imply the need for new urban knowledge or at least fresh ways to apply older understandings. Although various cities around the world have long faced organized violence, both internal and from the outside, the attacks on New York and the Pentagon shatter precedents in a number of respects. They raise the potential for new research strategies that might lessen danger from terrorists as well as from authoritarian internal responses that undermine civic society and, over the long haul, the means of urban self-protection. We define`terror' as an attack on civilians to communicate a political message (Gearty, 2002). We do not here deal with state-organized terror, focused as we are on security within the US and other countries that remain safe from such aggression (while capable of practicing it). With a focus on the recent US events, we join other efforts (see, e.g., Graham and Marvin, forthcoming) in helping redress the relative lack of study, in general, of cities in the context of war. The New York and Washington events obviously differ from conventional military assaults on cities like the sacking of Rome or General Sherman's march on Atlanta. The terrorist aim is not against cities as the container of military targets or booty, but as containers of people. The aerial bombardments that began during the first world war were a start in this direction, with the apogee achieved by US bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, along with the destruction of Dresden. Different from such state-directed campaigns, and hence closer in type, is the mayhem experienced in Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, and continuing in the Middle East. But unlike those instances of proximate shelling or guerilla war, the September 11th attacks did not arise from an ongoing localistic conflict over access to land and symbolic sites. They were assaults organized from far away, constituting a local-global nexus in threat and vulnerability. The events resemble state-centered aggression in their distant origin and in the scale of damage; three`bombs' destroy thousands of lives and billions in assets. But this damage did not come from a state adversary at all, but from faith-based subversives who, at least for a time, operated locally. They did not use the more modest means of partial destruction associated with urban guerillas. For all the violent results, the Irish insurrectionaries tended to set off their London explosives when offices were closed or after issuing warnings to evacuate. Perhaps an element of cross-group empathy blunted the strategic use of death. Nor, as sometimes is the pattern, did the September 11th attackers gun down or kidnap victims moving through urban space. Instead, the complexity and magnitude of metropolitan life was used against itself, a move of urban Aikido terror in which the smaller opponent leverages the giant's strength to bring it down. The distant subaltern gains the means, previously reserved for colonialists and great powers, to engage in remote control (see Law, 1984).