Centring the Urban in Our Understanding of Violence

A growing consensus suggests that violence is increasingly concentrated in urban areas (see Sundberg & Melander 2013; Höglund et al. 2016; Brathwaite & Konaev 2022). Yet evidence that armed inter- and intra-state conflicts have taken a decisive ‘urban turn’ is mixed at best (see Urdal 2005; Buhaug & Urdal 2013; Elfversson & Höglund 2021). To a large extent, the ambiguity may be attributed to mainstream ways of coding conflict.  For one, demarcating conflict as a contested incompatibility—a disagreement that concerns control over government and/or territory—or between clearly identifiable and organised groups tends to obscure local variation. Cities that experience high rates of homicide relative to even the most brutal civil wars are, as a result, not classified as ‘conflict-cases’ absent these criteria. In a related vein, ‘post-conflict’ cities that continue to experience violence in other forms—driven by a re-configuration and re-labelling of actors, shifting incentives, allegiances, and modes of control—also elude classification. “Mean-spirited” analyses, invalid national to local mappings, and the use of geospatial gridded-data that only loosely correspond to cities consequently underscore the need to more effectively centre the urban in our understanding of violence (Snyder 2001, p. 98; Elfversson & Höglund 2021).THE RE-CONFIGURATION OF THE URBAN PARADIGM, WOULD HAVE US QUESTION THE VERY NOTION OF THE CITY AS A UNIT OF ANALYSIS, EXTENDING OUR VIEW BEYOND ITS MORE BOUNDED AND STATIC TERRITORIAL CONFINES 

The very notion of the ‘urban’ can be further problematised. Cities are by no means homogenous sites—“urban peripheries” reinforce relations of mutual dependence (Caldeira & Holston 2008), displacing rural for increasingly urban forms of subjugation and socio-spatial seclusion (Wacquant 2009). Identities in urban settings are purposed and re-purposed in response to new spatial orders or disorders—Nigeria’s top-down ‘political economy of predation’ has, for instance, generated variegated, violent forms of urban resistance from the bottom-up, ranging from youth associations to ‘area boys’, vigilantes and student-led cults that draw on existing cultural repertoires (Gore & Pratten 2003). And geographies of urban territorial control—from streets to neighbourhoods and municipalities—differ appreciably. In a similar vein, violence need not be distributed evenly across urban areas, taking distinct forms that vary over space and time.

Drawing on Lefebvre (2003), a growing body of work further problematises the very distinction between ‘urban’ and ‘non-urban’ regions, challenging the notion of the urban as a static, spatially demarcated unit of analysis. Adopting a lens that acknowledges the unprecedented scale of metropolitan areas, scholars point to the growing relocation of key urban functions to suburbs, the repurposing of corridors linking urban to non-urban spaces, and the degradation of the wilderness—calling for a “new conceptualisation of urbanisation processes both within and beyond those settlement spaces that are demarcated as ‘cities’ ” (Brenner & Schmid 2014, p. 749). “Planetary urbanisation”, the label that Brenner and Schmid give to the reconceptualisation or re-configuration of the urban paradigm, would have us question the very notion of the city as a unit of analysis (ibid).

The essays in this volume, the product of a new “research practicum” course in the political science/international relations department, draw on these debates to reflect on the associations between cities—their political orders and disorders—and outcomes that range from occupation and resistance to marginalisation and containment. Employing an eclectic set of theoretical perspectives, the essays highlight how spatial settlements patterns and spatio-temporal borders shape the lived experiences of refugees and asylum seekers from conflicted-affected locales in urban areas. Others question the very characterisation of militant movements as distinctly urban or rural, and political orders as distinctly state- or non-state based. Still others examine how urban design—from the planning of state capitals to urban peripheries—shapes protest, crime and inequality. The cases range from Beirut, Gaza, Idlib and Jerusalem in the Middle East, Myanmar in South East Asia, to Milan and Paris in Europe. Together, the essays prefigure the potential of centring—and challenging—the urban in our understanding of contemporary conflict, violence, and peace. They constitute a first step towards a more textured understanding that mobilises spatial, temporal, and visual modes of analysis. The promise lies in making visible the varied roles that urban morphologies play, adding to the debate on cities in and as sites of conflict.