Cities are complex systems, but they are incomplete systems. Their urbanized formats vary enormously across time and place. In this mix of complexity and incompleteness lies the possibility of making and remaking the urban—the political, the civic, a history.
One question we need to ask when it comes to the issues raised by our diverse authors is whether such urban capabilities can also operate in war zones. What our authors show is that they can, albeit to a limited extent, and those capabilities are often subject to interruptions.
The yogurt run described in the introduction to this volume is a good example of such capabilities in play, even if that run is reduced when armed conflicts arise. We must recognize that a city’s people, as distinct from the military in that city, are going to have to scramble every day for food, water, medications, and shelter. The residents also run the risk of serious injury and worry about children, neighbors, and others. The military, though not always armed groups, are, generally speaking, provided with what they need. A city’s residents are mostly not. But it is also in cities—whether at peace or at war—that lies the possibility for those who may have long lacked power to be able to make a history, a politics, even if they do not get empowered. This becomes evident in some of the valiant efforts by those at risk who are described in the various chapters of this book. Powerlessness can become complex in the city, even in the city at war.
Urban Space Becomes Strategic
Against the background of an often acute, even if partial, disassembling of nation-states in war zones, the city can function as a strategic site for the active creation of minor, often temporary “orderings”—orderings that can take on multiple, highly variable, always partial formats. These can include spatial, economic, political, environmental, and cultural conditions and instantiations. In this book, our authors provide multiple diverse, mostly minor cases of such interventions—interventions that for the most part address desperate survival needs. The chapters include examples of urban resistance to war, as in Novi Pazar, or of the way in which the international humanitarian industry intersects with waves of refugees to produce dynamic transborder trade even in the midst of war (Goma), or of self-reinforcing trust between local communities and security forces as in the rural hinterland of Kabul. And in the cases of Bogotá and Ciudad Juárez, we observe imaginative efforts by local authorities to promote new forms of public civic security that are more or less successful.
Such minor or even major survival interventions by the women, men, and children living in cities at war are not often described in analyses of war situations. We have found that it might be worthwhile to consider such interventions, minor as they might be. Rather than seeing these modest efforts as somewhat irrelevant to the analysis of cities at war, we join the growing movement to recover the daily lives of people struggling in a war situation. In addition, we conceive of these practices as a mode of tactical urbanism: tactical because it has to adjust to conditions that vary continuously from day to day and in the most extreme situations, often even hour by hour.
The Urban Map of Terror
Beyond the cases examined in each chapter, we have seen an urbanizing of war over the last several decades—from the attack on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, to the attack on the Manhattan towers, to the destruction of Aleppo or Mosul, and to terrorist attacks in London, Paris, Mumbai, and Madrid, to name a few. This is in sharp contrast to classical wars, which most often engaged the enemy in vast open spaces—from oceans to skies. In World War II, of course, cities were also hit, or, at the most extreme, purposefully destroyed, with Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki the key telling historical instances.
In our project the focus is on a range of diverse conflict zones where cities function mostly as key operational spaces. One major reason for this particular difference with classical wars is the fact that today’s wars largely involve a combination of networks of state and nonstate actors, and they feature air strikes conducted by governments combined with a range of militias and irregular combatants operating on the ground. The foregoing chapters address cities facing deep insecurity as a consequence of the war on terror, such as Bamako, Kabul, Baghdad, and Karachi. Yet in most cases the war on terror intersects with criminality and ethnic violence; in this respect we observe different combinations in our different field sites—criminality in Bogotá, criminality and the war on terror in Ciudad Juárez, and ethnic violence and criminality in Goma.
What matters for our analysis when it comes to these new types of war is that cities become key strategic ground for armed conflict, because it is mostly in cities that irregular combatants are safest. Yet these chapters show that urban warfare does not exclude other frontiers. Indeed, warfare is a method of remapping geography, as the chapters on Bamako and Karachi vividly illustrate. New internal frontiers involving fences, gates, checkpoints, and private security contractors are constructed within cities through a process of enclavization (Karachi), privatization (Ciudad Juárez), and ghettoization. New so-called frontier zones of remote border areas, deserts, mountains, and the like are also rearing back in force, as explored in the Mali case, in the story of Kabul and its hinterland and of Karachi vis-à-vis the tribal areas.
How can we understand this fragmentation of warfare across both urban and remote domains? How do different scales of warfare and security intervention intersect? To take an example, the cities of Niger and, to some extent, Mali have come to host large foreign counterterror forces and serve as drone bases and thereby link the scale of the city—and local tensions around this presence within the city—to a vast hinterland. Again, this is similar to the case in the fortified parts of Kabul with regard to the U.S. bombardment of Afghan border areas, which also involved other cities and headquarters far from the zone of combat. International security assemblages do not always exacerbate violence; in some places such as Goma, a liberal peace presence can play a relatively benign role.
Nor is it only violence that reshapes urban spaces and remakes precarity and insecurity. The dramatic decline of value-adding production, increased inequalities, and the disassembly of states associated with global neoliberalism compounds the tensions that crisscross the city with which its residents must contend every day.
Returning to the Yogurt Run
The nature of contemporary warfare means that people, more than armies, are a key presence. This marks a rather sharp differentiation from earlier wars. Of keen interest to us is that these conditions for war mobilize the residents of those cities that have become part of the war zone.
Survival in a city that has become part of the theater of war requires its people to adjust to the situation. Some may be able to flee because they have an alternative. But most people in such a city are stuck. The main concern under such conditions will be the search for what is necessary to survive. If survival entails negotiating for food and other critical items, survival will override (if possible) just about all other rules of the game. What we have called the yogurt run is an emblematic case. It tells us, or makes visible, how residents relate to the notion of an enemy. We cannot name the particular cities in play, as that would expose both sides to the wrath of their controlling armies.
War or not, a key priority for urban residents is securing their needs. And if that entails bringing in the yogurt from a city that is on the other side of the armed conflict, that is fine. It is a run that has to cross multiple battle lines—the armed insurgents, conventional militaries, criminal gangs, and ethnic militias that inhabit this new type of warfare. And out of this crossing it may be possible to identify new ways of confronting violence.