Martin Shaw
New wars of the city
Contents: War and the modern city / The guerrilla threat to the city / Anti-urbanism in the new wars
War is commonly understood as a phenomenon of one form of spatial organisation, the territorial nation-state. And yet in the history of human society, the state was not always nation-based, and in the history of states, control of urban space has often been pivotal to their survival. Even in the era of nation-states, warfare frequently revolved around the holding or capture of cities. Sieges were defining moments.
At the end of the twentieth century, as nation-states fragment and the system of nation-states is partially superceded by global politics, the city has a new centrality in the ‘new wars’ of genocide. This centrality has not been understood, however, because the wars which have followed the Cold War have been misapprehended as ‘ethnic’ conflicts. In this paper I attempt to outline, schematically, the changing historical significance of cities in warfare, and to develop some theses on the new wars as wars of the city.
In the origins of the modern polis, city and state were one. War in Greek civilisation was a struggle of city-states, and although warfare often took place outside the city, the urban centre itself always the ultimate prize. The Roman empire, based on the greatest city-state of all, built fortified cities as centres of its far-flung power. Cities were bulwarks of Roman civilisation, defended against barbarian hordes. The sack of Rome itself symbolised the defeat of its civilisation and the descent into fractured political authority and social precariousness.
For more than a thousand years afterwards, state power remained fragmentary and its borders uncertain, and the city retained a special role in the state. The city in medieval Europe was a fortified space, the only relatively certain territory wherein the writ of rulers ran, the redoubt which they could be reasonably sure of defending when more remote territories fell to an invader, were under the control of rebellious lords, or were plagued by robbers and bandits. The siege remained the ultimate moment of war, when the centre fell.
Modernity transformed the relationship of cities and states. States became, as Giddens as put it, ‘bordered power countainers’. Within the territories of states, the writ of rulers was consolidated by extended ‘surveillance’. Between states, borders became demarcations of violence: now the whole territory claimed by the state would be defended. The state was defined by nation, not city, and the whole population of the nation, even in border regions - even sometimes beyond the borders - became part of the national ‘defence’ of the state.
So although cities grew enormously as wealth and population expanded, their special military significance changed. The extended cities of modernity surpassed the historic fortified boundaries, and the fortifications fell into irrelevance or decay rather than being re-built with each phase of expansion. Many new industrial cities grew from what had previously been insignificant villages. While the gap between city and country remained, and indeed was in some ways intensified in the early phases of industrialism, it was no longer a military border.
This is not to say that cities lost all military significance. Capitals still remained the political and administrative if not military centres of state power, and their capture remained the ultimate symbol of conquest and national survival. The successive falls of Paris, for example, in the Franco-Prussian and the two world wars, epitomised France’s repeated humiliations by German power. The fall of Madrid was a decisive defeat for Spain’s Republic in the civil war. The defence of Stalingrad, in contrast, was a powerful symbol of Soviet defiance and a portent of Hitler’s ultimate failure.
Industrial cities were also of great strategic significance, as they were the engines of the new industrialised war. The difference was largely that cities were no longer built for military defence, and increasingly they were militarily indefensible. Fortifications were no longer generally fixed structures, and where they were - as in the Maginot Line - they were not around cities. Cities were therefore increasingly open to conquest - and not only to occupation on the ground. The new techniques of total warfare brought special dangers to cities. The tank, developed in the first world war for use in the open battlefields of the Western front, was an instrument of indiscriminate destruction in urban settings, although its mobility could also be hampered in narrow streets. The warplane, which first flew over the trenches in 1914-18, was recognised as an instrument of urban mass terror long before its emblematic use at Guernica.
The full potential of modern war for urban killing was demonstrated in the dreadfully misnamed ‘strategic bombing’ of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo in the latter stages of the second world war. The atomic bomb completed this new vulnerability of the city: whole conurbations and their populations were destroyed instantaneously at Hiroshima and Nagosaki. At the same time, new and vile forms of urban life were developed in the Nazi genocide. Hitler’s war machine, having first turned Jewish ghettos into grotesque caricatures of city life, then created special cities of death, the extermination camps, for their victims.
The relationship between the ‘deliberate’ Nazi genocide and the ‘strategic’ mass murder of Allied bombing campaigns is interesting. With a single atomic bomb, any city could become an instant Auschwitz. In the nuclear age, the city was no longer so important as the industrial engine or political motor of total war, but urban areas remained strategic targets as NATO and the Warsaw Pact developed computerised maps of doom. In the age of the inter-continental ballistic missile, the capacity to simultaneously destroy all the major centres of urban life became a symbol of war which was no longer simply genocidal, but produced ‘mutually assured destruction’, an ‘exterminism’ (as EP Thompson called it) which threatened human life as such. Peace movements declared cities across the world ‘nuclear-free zones’ in their attempt to prevent this catastrophe. Fortunately, the threat to cities from nuclear war has remained hypothetical in the period after 1945, although cities have remained highly volunerable to aerial attack, as the 1991 destruction of Baghdad’s infrastructure showed.
The guerrilla threat to the city
An actual threat to many cities has been posed by guerilla war. Although guerilla war has been romanticised as a progressive movement for social change - the ‘revolution in the revolution’ as the French theorist Régis Debray famously called it - it involved a reaction to the classic urban-democratic model of revolution. In nineteenth and early twentieth century revolutions, middle- and working-class city-dwellers challenged authoritarian and aristocratic rulers in order to create democratic forms of power. The socialist and communist traditions initially represented extensions of this model. St Petersburg in 1917 and Barcelona in 1936 both followed the pattern which originated in Paris in 1789, in which democratic urban revolt provided leadership to peasant uprisings. Following the degeneration of soviet democracy into party dictatorship in Russia, the Stalinised communist parties renounced the democratic urban revolution - in some cases in favour of reformism, in others of guerilla struggle. Guerilla war represented an authoritarian form of revolutionary change which has been hostile to the plural, creative dynamics of modern city life.
The guerilla-based communist strategy, first fully developed in China, involved a militarised party mobilising peasant support to surround the cities, before entering them as conqueror. Communist parties which achieved power in this way created centralised dictatorships which repressed democratic urban life. The degree of repression varied greatly, from the relative openness and tolerance of Tito’s Yugoslavia to the extreme closure and cultural monolithism of Hoxha’s Albania.
The anti-urban bias of communist regimes originating in rural wars was evident, however, in some of their most destructive phases. In Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ in the late 1960s, urban intellectuals - artists, teachers, officials - were targetted in officially orchestrated mass violence, and often punished by being deported to the countryside where their bodies and in some cases minds were broken by crude physical labour. Mao’s clients, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, carried this anti-urbanism to even viler extremes, deporting the entire population of cities and exterminating them in an anti-urban genocide.
In both these cases, the city was seen as a source of moral pollution, to be ‘cleansed’ by contact with the hardworking peasantry. The critique of urban ‘decadence’ had much in common with Nazi hatred of the plural urban culture of Weimar cities. Although genocide is often thought of as carried out by one ethnic or national group against another, it is important to remember that the Cambodian genocide was an urbicide - it was about the destruction of urban culture and the killing of all those contaminated by it, as even the term killing fields , by which it became known, suggests.
In the North, however, with the end of the Cold War and the lifting of the nuclear threat, the city has ceased to be a symbolic place of death, and has started to be seen once more - despite the other dangers of crime and pollution which still threaten it - as a place of life, a centre of the pluralism, diversity and creativity of modern civilisation. Military bases are typically located in rural areas, leaving the city as a demilitarised zone. Although militaries consume the scientific and technical knowledge which are produced in urban universities, these functions are almost hidden in institutions dominated by a civilian ethos.
The contemporary West is therefore a ‘post-military’ society in which military institutions no longer have a central place. Conscription has been abolished or minimised in most advanced societies. Where non-military service is an easy option, educated urban youth are quick to escape - in Germany, for example, over one-third of young men opt for civilian rather than military service. In professional armed forces, it is rare that recruits come from educated urban elites, although urban workers - blighted by the unemployment produced by industrial decline - have provided disproportionate numbers of soldiers.
Post-military urban culture is still saturated with military symbols, but the cult of heroic armed forces has given way to the fascination of the high-tech weapon in a commercialised ‘armament culture’. Even real wars are fought, so far as Western urban dwellers are concerned, in remote landscapes encapsulated on their television screens. Michael Mann called it ‘spectator sport’ militarism: mediated violence in which the modern urban dweller participates, not as a foot-soldier as his or her grandfather did, but as a consumer of images. Viewers know that real violence occurs in a war like the Gulf, but they expect that their own sons and brothers will not be killed. Governments calculate their strategic options on the basis of avoiding death to modern urban-dwellers.
Military institutions themselves are becoming ‘civilianised’, adapting to the exigencies of high-tech, low-casualty war. Technical, political and managerial knowledge have become more important. Women and even (in some cases) homosexuals have been accepted into many branches of military power. The prime function of armed force has begun to shift from warfighting to war management (more commonly called peacekeeping and peace enforcement). In this sense, the more advanced Western militaries exhibit a more modern, urban, even semi-democratic ethos. The military sociologist Charles Moskos identifies the officer of the future as an urbanised ‘soldier-scholar’ - a far cry from the not-so-distant days when many officer corps were often recruited from aristocratic landowners and reflected their social manners and prejudices.
While the city becomes demilitarised and conventional military forces urbanised, new forms of violence within and against the city have made it the focus of new wars. In the West, inner-urban areas of large cities and conurbations are often centres of violent crime, but typical violence is more individual than collective. Nevertheless, the era of mass unemployment, often concentrated in some inner- and outer-urban areas, has given rise to more pervasive, often drug-related violence which increasingly takes a gang form. In the United States especially, many areas of cities are battlegrounds for gang violence. This low-grade urban warfare has been both cause and consequence of the middle class flight to the suburbs. In poorer countries, these problems are often even more acute. As urban areas have burgeoned, shanty towns have arisen on the edges of older cities, where the poor and unemployed are concentrated in slum conditions. Both individual and collective violence are often rife.
Gang violence is often dubbed ‘warfare’ and has many similarities with more fully-fledged ‘new wars’ of the 1990s. Violence between supporters of the African National Congress and Inkatha in the Zulu areas of Natal, which reached its peak during South Africa’s transition to democracy, mobilised young, unemployed men in the townships. Although called ‘township wars’, much of the worst violence was in rural areas, where supporters of the ethnically-based Inkatha were often stronger than the urban, multi-ethnic, civic-nationalist ANC. These smouldering mini-wars of the new South Africa were not specifically urban, and indeed incorporated a definite anti-urban element.
An anti-urban element is a common characteristic of the ‘new wars’ even where they mobilise urban discontents. Ethnic-nationalist political movements often depend on a specific rural and small-town hatred of the city. They are often led by urban intellectuals from rural backgrounds, by those who have shared but remain uncomfortable with cosmopolitan urban culture - like the leader of the Serbian genocide in Bosnia, Radovan Karadzic, who came from backward Montenegro to practise as a pyschiatrist in plural Sarajevo. Their support is often strongest in relatively isolated rural areas - like the ‘Krajina’ strongholds of Serbian nationalism in Croatia and the Herzegovinan fiefdom of Croatian nationalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Pluralist, non-ethnic democratic politics, in contrast, is nearly always strongest in larger urban areas. It is rooted in the character of these areas: education, intermarriage, cultural and media diversity led, for example, to far more people in Sarajevo than in other areas identifying themselves non-ethnically, as Bosnians or Yugoslavs rather than Muslims, Serbs or Croats, in the last Yugoslav census. As the power of nationalist authoritarianism has waned, it has done so first in the large urban areas - both Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman and Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic have annulled democratic local elections in their capital cities, won by the opposition, in order to hang on to power.
I pointed out above a common misunderstanding of genocide as the destruction of one ethnic group by another - a misconception which is clearly disproved by the case of the anti-urban genocide in Cambodia. This mistake has been repeated in many analyses of the wars in Yugoslavia. These wars, like the Nazi war against the Jews, were explicitly genocidal wars, in which the people were as much, or more, an enemy than opposing states or armies. They were initiated by urban political elites and orchestrated using modern urban mass media. Their political support was rooted, however, in the narrow ethnic traditions of the rural and small-town Serb- and Croat-populated areas, and directed against the cosmopolitan way of life in the large urban areas.
There were in fact two sides to the genocides carried out by Serbian and Croatian forces. On the one hand, there was the ‘ethnic cleansing’ (a term which originates with Serbian nationalists and should not be used as a neutral description). In this, non-Serb (chiefly Muslim and Croat) and non-Croat (Muslim and Serb) populations were forcibly expelled from their homes, land, villages and towns, on grounds of their ethnicity, and ethnically ‘pure’ mini-states were established. On the other hand, the genocidists aimed to destroy plural, multi-ethnic urban communities, which even more than other ethnic communities offended against their ethnic-national ideals and were obstacles to their victory. Sarajevo - historically a centre of all the major religions, of co-habitation and tolerance, of education, intellectual and artistic life, of high intermarriage and Yugoslav identity - was anathema to the Serbian and Croatian nationalists.
The two sides to the genocide came together because the ‘ethnic cleansers’ saw the educated urban elite within the enemy communities as their first target in each town and village they conquered. Teachers, officials and other ‘intellectuals’ were the first to be selected for deportation and killing. On the other side, Bosnian (Muslim) nationalism was the only nationalist movement not to have a genocidal project, to tolerate other ethnicities and allow political pluralism within its territory. The struggle for an independent, plural, democratic Bosnia and the campaign of Bosnian nationalists were, for the most part, the same fight, although Muslim nationalism at times showed the same intolerance and tendency towards persecution as the other ethnic political projects.
While the Bosnian war can be considered a war of the city, in the sense that the viability of plural, democratic urban life was a key point of contention, it is important to emphasise that it was also a war within the city. One of the striking features of the new wars is the economic degeneration which accompanies them. Rooted often in economic failure - the failure of market reform in Yugoslavia, the more comprehensive failures of many African economies - new wars are also wars of privatisation in the basest sense. Even where as in Bosnia the central protagonists were state forces (the ex-Yugoslav army still under Serbian state command), a key role was played by private gangs. Raiding parties of extreme Serbian nationalists, led by notorious criminals like Arkan, were unleashed by President Milosevic as the front-runners of genocide. In both Croatia and Bosnia, these ‘unofficial’ warriors often initiated the indiscriminate killing, burning and rape of conquered communities.
Everywhere in the Yugoslav wars, indeed, private gain was in the forefront of genocide. The nationalist killing-gangs looted on a big scale. ‘Weekend warriors’ travelled to Bosnia from Serbia-Montenegro and Croatia, to take pot-shots at helpless Sarajevo residents or to loot abandoned villages, often returning home with someone else’s TV or video recorder. Individuals and families annexed the farms, houses and other property of dispossessed neighbours, just as overall, the nationalist movements annexed whole towns and villages.
Within even the most cosmopolitian urban areas, the shortages of war gave rise to huge black markets. At times almost the only viable economic activity was that of criminal gangs. Given the lack of Bosnian military forces at the outset of the war, militia led by notorious underworld figures played a prominent part in Sarajevo’s defence (only later in the war did the state assume real control of a national Bosnian army).
The industrial city, particularly, fell into decay as a functioning economic unit. Most industries ceased to operate. Only tiny fractions of pre-war economic output and employment were maintained. Urban economies were even more damaged than those of at least the safer rural areas, where subsistence and local market farming remained possible. Even cities which were saved from destruction or genocidal occupation fell apart, therefore, under the economic pressures of the new wars. There was large-scale emigration, especially of younger, more educated people, who were replaced by refugees ‘cleansed’ from small towns and villages.
These experiences of new urban warfare close to the heart of Europe have been repeated, under even worse conditions, throughout the Caucasian region of the former Soviet area, and in large parts of Africa. Sarajevo and Tuzla, for all their human and physical degradations, have continued to function as urban communities. The same cannot so easily be said of Mogadishu, where modern urban life more or less disintegrated and the gangs and warlords reigned supreme, or of many other towns in the new zones of war.
Throughout history, the concentration of human populations in larger settlements has provided resources for rulers and would-be rulers to wage war. At the same time, however, it has provided highly vulnerable targets for warfare. In the modern city, which is no longer physically organised for defence, the balance has shifted overwhelmingly in favour of vulnerability. Historically huge populations, whose lives are more dependent than ever before on sophisticated technical systems, are easy targets for the killing-power and physical destructiveness of advanced military technology. Moreover, it is what the city represents which is at stake, as much as the existence of its inhabitants and their physical surroundings.
Contemporary wars are wars of the city, threatened from within as well as without by social forces which deny the vital impulses of modern urban civilisation. The challenge is to find ways of renewing that civilisation which undermine the causes of war and enable us to revitalise cities and society, so that we may harness urban forms for peaceful social life.