The City-Logic of Resistance: Subverting Urbicide in the Middle East City

Abstract

Most armed conflict today takes place within urban terrain or within an urbanised context. An extreme variant of such armed conflict is violence perpetrated by external state and non-state forces within the city, known as urbicide. Urbicidal violence deliberately strives to kill, discipline or deny the city to its inhabitants by targeting and then reordering the sociomaterial urban assemblage. Civil resistance within urbicidal violence seeks to subvert the emerging alternative sovereign order sought by such forces. It does so by using the inherent logic of the city in order to maintain/restore the community’s social cohesion, mitigate the violence, affirm humanity, and claim the right to the city. This paper investigates the city-logic of civil resistance through examples drawn from the recent urbicidal experiences of Middle East cities such as Gaza, Aleppo, Mosul, and Sana’a. Theoretical insights from the conflict resolution literature, critical urban theory, and assemblage thinking inform the argument.

Keywords:

• civil resistance
• assemblages
• urbicide
• Middle East cities

Notes

1 Civil resistance is defined here as ‘a method of conflict where unarmed civilians use a variety of coordinated methods to prosecute the conflict without directly harming (or threatening to harm) an opponent’ (Chenoweth 2014, 351).

2 Cities cited in the text include: Gaza, Palestine; Daraa, Syria; Sa’dah, Yemen; Sana’a, Yemen; Darayya, Syria; Hebron, Palestine; Aleppo, Syria; Mosul, Iraq; Yarmouk Camp (Greater Damascus), Syria; Raqqa, Syria; Idlib, Syria; Homs, Syria; Beirut, Lebanon; Hudaydah, Yemen; Beit Lahiya, Gaza Strip, Palestine; Taiz, Yemen.

3 Why Daraa? This rebel city had always been on the edge of the ‘Damascus’ urban network, never integrated, and drawing its energy more from translocal tribal dynamics. Like Aleppo and Homs, Daraa was always trouble for the centralised Damascus state.

4 The concept of ‘urban resilience’ has taken hold globally over the past 20 years, offering primarily neoliberal sets of policy prescriptions and urban praxis for enhancing the ability of cities to prevent, mitigate, handle, recover from disaster and major disruption.

5 Within the Middle East, the Arabic term sumud is a social resilience concept which originally emerged within the Palestinian struggle against the expansionist Israeli state. Originally reactive and passive but now proactive and transformative, sumud combines ‘staying on the land’ with communal construction, including steadfastness in the face of attempts at removal or forced exile. Framed in this way, the citizens of Gaza and Hebron are both heroic and living the everyday as samadin (Shehadeh 1982).

6 The Gaza rapper, Ibrahim Adnan Ghunaim, expressed the translocal networks among scar cities in a video entitled From Gaza to Aleppo in which he argues that cities from Jerusalem to Baghdad to Gaza to Aleppo need to stand together against violence, the weaponisation of everyday life, and failed guardians. https://www.albawaba.com/loop/palestinian-rappers-emotional-music-video-gaza-aleppo-same-wound-836310?quicktabs_accordion=0, accessed 24 July 2017.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bruce Stanley

BRUCE STANLEY is Adjunct Professor of International Relations at Richmond University (London) where he teaches conflict resolution and Middle East politics. He has managed development NGOs, and conducted conflict resolution training, in the Middle East. He is currently writing a book entitled Thinking Middle East City Networks.