[Reader-list] Cities and new wars: after Mumbai

[Angshukanta Chakraborty]

Cities and new wars: after Mumbai  Saskia
Sassen<http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/Saskia_Sassen.jsp>

The attacks on India's commercial capital belong to a global frontline of
asymmetric urban warfare, says Saskia Sassen.


29 - 11 - 2008

 The Mumbai attacks of 26-29 November 2008 are part of an emerging type of
urban violence. These were organised, simultaneous frontal assaults with
grenades and machine-guns on ten high-profile sites in or near the central
business and tourism district.Also in *openDemocracy* on the assaults
of November 2008 in Mumbai:

Kanishk Tharoor, "What to make of the Mumbai
attacks<http://www.opendemocracy.net/india/blog/kanishk_tharoor/mumbai_attacks_terrorism_democracy>"
(27 November 2008)

This has affinities with the asymmetric street warfare waged by the gangs in
Rio de Janeiro that every now and then announce they will take over a major
central area of the city from (say) 9am to 5pm: the result is shuttered
shops and empty streets. If the police try to respond, it is open warfare,
and the police rarely win - this is a
challenge<http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/13/america/brazil.php>for
which the police are not trained. After 5pm the gangs withdraw. It is
often said that all of this results from inadequate policing or crime waves.


But that is too simple. There is a deeper transformation afoot. It is still
rare but it is more frequently becoming
visible<http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2008/09/the-crossover-of-urban-gang-wa/>.
It is as if the centre no longer holds. Cities seem to be losing the
capacity they have long had to triage conflict - through commerce, through
civic activity. The national state, confronted with a similar conflict, has
historically chosen to go to war. In my new research project - on cities and
war - I am studying<http://www.sociology.columbia.edu/fac-bios/sassen/faculty.html>whether
cities are losing this capacity and are becoming sites for a range
of new types of violence.

Further, the new asymmetric wars have the effect of
urbanising<http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book.asp?ref=9781405115742>war.
This brings with it a nasty twist: when national states go to war in
the name of national security, nowadays major cities are likely to become a
key frontline space. In older conventional wars, large armies needed large
open fields or oceans to meet and fight, and these were the frontline
spaces.


Today the search for national security may well become a source for urban
insecurity. The "war on terror" reveals that cities become the theatres for
asymmetric war, regardless of what side of the divide they are - allies or
enemies. The attacks in Madrid, London, Casablanca, Bali, are symptomatic.
So too is the United States's conventional military aerial bombing. It took
under three weeks to destroy the Iraqi army's resistance and take over power
in 2003. But then the asymmetric wars set in, with Baghdad, Mosul, Basra,
and other Iraqi cities the sites of conflict - for years. Indeed, the fact
that the Mumbai
attackers<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7754456.stm>evidently
sought and prized Americans and British among the hostages they
took, is clearly related to George W Bush's declaration of war on Iraq and
Britain's supportive role.

The traditional security paradigm based on national-state security does not
accommodate this triangulation. What may be good to protect the national
state apparatus may cost major cities and their people a high (increasingly
high) price. In the dense and
conflictive<http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflicts/global_security/tale_two_towns>spaces
of cities, a variety of forms of violence can be foreseen.

Moreover, new kinds of crises 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. These crises could feed
the violence that can
arise<http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/a-world-in-the-balance>from
extreme economic inequality, and racial and religious conflicts.

The results will be felt particularly in cities because of the often
profound kinds of dependence of cities on complex systems - apartment
buildings, hospitals, vast sewage systems, huge underground transport
systems, whole electric grids - all of which rest on computerised management
vulnerable to breakdowns. A major mock experiment by Nasa found that by the
fifth day of a breakdown in the computerised systems that manage the
electric grid, a city like New York would be *in extremis*. In Mumbai's
tragedy<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/south_asia/2008/mumbai_attacks/default.stm>can
be glimpsed the image of a global future.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S Lynd professor of sociology and member,
Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. Her books include *Losing
Control? Sovereignty in the Age of
Globalization<http://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/071603.asp>
*(Columbia University Press, 1996) and *The Global City: New York, London,
Tokyo <http://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/071603.asp> *(Princeton
University Press, 2001). Her latest book is *Territory, Authority, and
Rights: From Medieval to Global
Assemblages<http://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/071603.asp>
* (Princeton University Press, 2006), based on a five-year project on
governance and accountability in a global economy

This article is based on a larger project, based on her new project on
Cities and War. A slightly different version was published in the *Huffington
Post*
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saskia-sassen/the-new-wars-and-cites-so_b_146810.html>(26
November 2008)

Among Saskia Sassen's articles in *openDemocracy*:

"A state of decay <http://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/071603.asp>" (3
May 2006)

*"*Globalisation, the state and the democratic
deficit<http://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/071603.asp>"
(18 July 2007)

"Lahore: urban space, niche
repression<http://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/071603.asp>"
(21 November 2007)

"The world's third spaces<http://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/071603.asp>"
(8 January 2008)

"Fear and strange
arithmetics..<http://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/071603.asp>."
(19 June 2008)