t byfield on Thu, 4 Dec 2008 08:19:24 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Saskia Sassen: Cities and new wars: after Mumbai |
Interesting. It isn't hard to see how and why it's tempting to hypostatize concepts like "war" and "city," but it'd be wise to treat each one skeptically, and even more so in relation to each other. And one needn't reach very far back in history at all to come up with absolute contrasts. These contrasts have many origins: the actual and theorized relationships between cities and their surroundings, the need for invading forces to establish strongholds close enough to support command and logistics needs, the various technical capacities of forces in conflict (of which there are, as often as not, many), styles of warfare that are much more complex than the simplistic dichotomy of a/symmetrical warfare, efforts to manipulate media (regional, global, sympathetic, etc), and so on. Take, for example, the Vietnam War. Films of American bombers dropping bombs in pairs seemingly at random across the Viet countryside have become a generic symbol of a futile effort to "bomb them back into the stone age" or "turn the country into a parking lot" -- two strikingly different historical vectors, yes? But this bombing wasn't random in some euphemistic sense of the term akin to "random violence," rather, it was *systematically random*: the purpose of this approach to bombing, which left deep craters, was to disrupt rural water tables and thereby drain rice paddies. This, in conjunction with chemical warfare (Agent Orange is well-known, Agent Blue, Agent White and others less so) and armored bulldozers formed the doctrine of "Landscape Management": an effort to deny the Viet Cong any and every form of cover -- physical, social, nutritional -- *in order to urbanize them*. (If you're doing serious research on this, I recommend reading the pithy works of Viet strategists, like Vo Nguyen Giap's _People's War Against U.S. Aeronaval War_, which the Viets, being communists, thoughtfully translated into English.) It should be noted that this approach was based on the experiences American forces during the close of WW2 and the Korean War, both of which involved extensive sociological studies -- about the effects of aerial bombing on urban centers, variations in food supplies, etc. In fact, one of the striking things about the wars the US is currently engaged in is how much the Pentagon seems to have forgotten. None of this theory is evident in its 'strategies' now, and in the recent brouhaha over its engagement with the social sciences, I didn't see a single reference to the centrality of these disciplines in shaping warfare, occupation, and counterinsurgency strategies. By the same token, I don't see how one could address "war" and "cities" without without explicitly considering these theoretical and institutional histories, if only because invading forces carry with them their own notions of what "civic" does and doesn't mean. Now contrast Vietnam with what happened to Grozny just thirty years later, where, after less than two months of full-scale warfare, Russian forces announced that anyone who remained "will be considered terrorists and bandits and will be destroyed by artillery and aviation." Before: http://www.kentlaw.edu/perritt/courses/seminar/2005-spring-papers/chris-s-Map%204-Grozny%20Before.jpg After: http://www.kentlaw.edu/perritt/courses/seminar/2005-spring-papers/chris-s-Map%207-Grozny%20After.jpg Or contrast that with Beirut. Sarajevo. Kigali. Fallujah. Jaffna. The list goes on and on, sadly. They're all "cities," but it's hard to see how one could generalize about their dynamics in conditions in conflict -- particularly in synchronous, categorical terms, which would seem to be the affirmative claim made if one avoids taking longer-term history into account. And, by a similar token, "war" is a very useful category where and when peace prevails, just as "peace" is useful in the context of war; but these categories aren't very good at articulating themselves. Cheers, T - http://b1ff.org!!! sjs2@columbia.edu (Wed 12/03/08 at 09:45 PM -0500): > hi, thanks for the comments. very helpful! and here two comments that > might help clarify.(please excuse the allthe typos. i wrote this at > great speed becasue i wanted to get it out right aftr i read > M.Goldhaber's comments. I agre with much of what Michael says re > history of cities, and i accept his scepticism about my new study. it > is a bit experimental indeed. but eachone of my porjects has entailed > going out on a wing a bit. <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org