World – Cities the target of asymmetrical warfare

Saskia Sassen

War between a conventional army and armed insurgents is making cities targets. Wednesday’s bomb explosion in Lahore is part of this pattern.

The pursuit of national security has become the making of urban insecurity. Asymmetric war — war between a conventional army and armed insurgents — has made cities a strategic technology for the latter. Wednesday’s (27MAY) bomb explosion in Lahore, which killed 30 and wounded up to 250, is part of this pattern. The blast damaged a government building as well as a nearby office of the Pakistan military’s main intelligence agency. It came after warnin gs of strikes in response to the army’s attack on militants in the Swat region in the north-west of the country.

The new urban map of terror is expansive: it goes far beyond the actual nations involved. The bombings in Madrid, London, Casablanca, Bali, Mumbai and more are all part of this map. Each of these bombings has its own specifics and can be explained in terms of particular grievances. These are localised actions by local armed groups, acting independently to each other. Yet they are also clearly part of a new kind of multi-sited war – a distributed and variable set of actions that gain larger meaning from a particular conflict with global projection.

Asymmetric war found one of its sharpest enactments in the U.S.-U.K. war on Iraq. The conventional military aerial bombing took only six weeks to destroy the Iraqi army. But then asymmetric war set in, with Baghdad, Mozul, Basra, and other cities the sites of conflict. And it has not stopped since. Asymmetric wars are partial, intermittent and lack clear endings.

This urbanising of war is different from past histories of cities and war. In older wars, large armies needed large open fields or oceans to meet and fight, and these were the frontline spaces. And during the Second World War one aim was urbicide — the destruction of cities as a way of terrorising a whole nation. This leads to the proposition that the traditional security paradigm based on national security fails to accommodate such a triangulation. What may be good to protect the national state apparatus may exact a high price from major cities.

Since 1998 most terrorist attacks have been in cities. Access to urban targets is far easier than access to planes for terrorist hijacking or to military installations. The U.S. Department of State’s annual report on global terrorism allows us to establish that today cities are the key targets for terror attacks, a trend that began before the attacks on New York in September 2001. From 1993 to 2000, cities accounted for 94 per cent of the injuries resulting from all terrorist attacks, and for 61 per cent of the deaths. And in the same period the number of incidents doubled, rising especially sharply after 1998.

There is a deeper transformation afoot. It is still rare, but it is popping up more frequently. Cities seem to be losing the capacity they have long had to triage conflict — through commerce or through civic activity. Confronted with a similar conflict, the national state has historically chosen to go to war. In my new research project I am studying whether cities are losing this capacity and are becoming sites for a whole range of new types of violence. To this we should add that the dense and conflictive spaces of cities can become the sites for a variety of secondary, more anomic types of conflicts — new types of gang warfare are an example, as today’s drug wars in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez indicate. We should add the new kinds of crises that may result from the major environmental disasters that are looming in our immediate futures. These will further challenge the traditional commercial and civic capacities that have allowed cities to avoid war when confronted with conflict. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2009

(Saskia Sassen is professor of sociology at Columbia University and the author of Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press).)