Cities at War: Global Insecurity and Urban Resistance

It would be difficult to find a more propitious editorial partnership for this volume. In 1991, Saskia Sassen published a seminal work in urban sociology, The Global City (Sassen 1991). Through a detailed analysis of financial services, she showed how London, Tokyo, and New York were becoming globalized urban centers. Globalization involved a dual process. At one level, the headquarters of financial services companies were concentrating into ever smaller urban locales in the business districts of these cities to exploit the networking advantages of propinquity and other privileges on offer. On the other, these companies were simultaneously expanding their activities transnationally, coordinating subsidiaries across the world. It was a striking thesis that, along with Castells’s (1991) The Informational City, was a major contribution to the study of urbanism at the time.

Eight years later, Mary Kaldor published New and Old Wars (Kaldor 1999). In response to the rise of contemporaneous ethnic conflicts, especially in the Balkans, Kaldor proposed a now-celebrated thesis: Clausewitz was dead. He had been the theorist of organized interstate war, but we were now moving into a new era of “war among the people.” Wars were no longer defined by progressive political projects, republicanism, nationalism, socialism, or communism, organized by or for a state. Organized violence was motivated by reactionary, predatory local ethnic interests, which also drew on global networks of funding, recruitment, and support. Kaldor discussed urban warfare briefly in New and Old Wars; she saw it as an important locus for ethnic violence, but there was no systematic treatment of the topic in that work.

In the 1990s, Sassen and Kaldor seemed a long way apart, with one working on cities and financial services and the other on war. Yet, there was a connection between them. In their work, they identified a common dynamic. Both the financial industry and conflict had globalized; they had been reconfigured by processes of localization and transnationalization. Banks and wars were both more localized than ever, but they were also more global. There was an interesting but often unseen parallel between their analysis.

Cities at War marks the conscious collaboration of two scholars on the question of urban conflict, drawing on this shared theoretical perspective. Kaldor and Sassen are well aware of their common approach to globalization. As they state in the introduction, “New wars are fought by networks of states and nonstate actors that are both global and local” (p. 7). Indeed, they actively try to highlight the glocal flows of conflict: “the explosion of house prices in London can be explained partly in terms of money-laundering activities of Syrian warlords” (p. 7). In this volume they are trying to show how the forces of globalization have affected urban conflict. It is, therefore, an intellectually significant enterprise.

Kaldor and Sassen are not interested in the specific dynamics of urban conflict or the armed forces that fight them, and still less in urban warfare more generally. They are concerned, rather, in how cities and, above all, their civilian populations respond to the insecurity precipitated by conflict: “This book is about insecurity in cities” (p. 2). Above all, they are concerned with the resilience of cities and their peoples in the face of violence. Kaldor and Sassen provide an emotive example of this human approach on the first page of the book in their discussion of the “yogurt run” in Ghouta. Ghouta is a suburb of Damascus that suffered a terrible siege from 2012 to 2018 that included the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Ghouta was also the site of an important dairy factory that supplied the city with yogurt and other products throughout the war. During the siege, dairy producers negotiated with government so that they could bring their essential products into the city: “We use the idea of the yogurt run as a metaphor to capture the presence of urban capabilities—the mutuality that underpins densely populated urban conurbations and that inherently provides a counter, however slight, to forcible fragmentation and closure” (pp. 1–2). For Kaldor and Sassen, “such urban capabilities—even where we least expect them to be present—is one key to understanding cities facing war or profound insecurity” (p. 2). Consequently, because citizens are their focus, they claim that “women and children are also key actors in these wars—they are not just victims” (p. 3). They are the prime focus.

Operating from this framework of urban resilience, each of the chapters in this volume discusses the way urban populations have responded to the threats that they have faced. Consequently, the chapters look at Bamako, Kabul, Baghdad, Ciudad Juarez and other Mexican border towns, Karachi, Bogota, the cities in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and Novi Pazar. In each case, reflecting the experiences of their human subjects, the authors adopt a light, biographical, and journalistic style. Human interest stories are at the center of these accounts, rather than critical academic analyses.

The chapters are all interesting and perceptive, but one of the most striking is Ali Ali’s chapter on Baghdad during the period of U.S. occupation of the city between 2003 and 2008. He examines how the division of the city into Green and Red Zones in 2003 drastically affected the lives of the inhabitants. Ali describes life in Al Ghazaliyya on the western edge of Baghdad on the border with Anbar Province. He narrates the experiences of Adnaan, a demobilized officer from the Republican Guard, and a local woman Um Ahmed and her daughter, Baan. Having left the dissolved Iraqi Army, Adnaan sought to work with the United States to defend the area from criminals with little initial success. At the height of the insurgency, the area became very insecure. Baan regularly saw armed men on her way to school and, on two occasions, she saw corpses in the street: “Baghdadis learned to leave bodies alone and to wait for the National Guard to pick them up. Armed groups often targeted those who approached corpses, even setting snipers to shoot people” (p. 93). Eventually, Ali records the decisive moment when Adnaan and his colleagues joined the militia, the Sons of Iraq, to ally with the United States. The district became temporarily safe as a result of the surge. Unfortunately, after the departure of the U.S. forces, the new Iraqi government implemented a sectarian policy and Adnaan was forced to leave the area. Ali concludes, “A tentative conclusion might be that security is achieved only through bottom-up inclusion and engagement” (p. 99).

Cities at War might not stand in quite the same league as The Global City or, indeed, New and Old Wars. It is a short, light work. It is, however, a very useful and enlightening contribution to the literature on contemporary urban conflict and to the growing scholarly interest in it. This volume will be an essential reference in all undergraduate and postgraduate courses about cities and urban conflict; it will be welcomed by experts, too.

Of course, the volume is not comprehensive. Indeed, despite the title of the volume, Kaldor and Sassen are not actually interested in war in cities, of which there has been an increasing amount in the twenty-first century. There is no discussion of the many recent urban battles, such as Aleppo, Mosul, or Marawi. Kaldor and Sassen are, as they explicitly state, interested in civilians, rather than combatants, and insecurity, rather than urban combat or military operations in the urban environment. Readers might look to other works if they are interested in the geography of urban warfare in the contemporary era (e.g., Graham 2000, 2004, 2010, 2018; Weizman 2007; King 2021).