The Thorny Road to Sustainable Peace: the mutation of violence in post-conflict cities (original) (raw)
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Before and after urban warfare: Conflict prevention and transitions in cities
The rising pressures of urbanization in fragile and conflict-affected countries have increased concerns about the vulnerability of cities to armed threats. Changes in the character of armed conflict during the twenty-first century and its effects on cities in the developing world have exposed gaps in the planning and practice of peace and security, which retain a " nation-State bias " that circumvents local perspectives and agencies. Whereas full-scale use of military power in cities remains as destructive today as it has ever been, international organizations such as the United Nations have called for changed approaches to State tactics in urban areas. Mechanisms designed to prevent conflict or to help countries transition back to peace are particularly key if massive human and economic damages are to be avoided in a world of increasingly dense cities. Another key concern is the vulnerability of developing-world cities to low-intensity, if protracted, forms of violence by non-State actors, particularly in post-conflict contexts.
Urban Violence Is Not (Necessarily) a Way of Life: Towards a Political Economy of Conflict in Cities
Urbanization and Development, 2010
Cities generally … comprise a motley of peoples and cultures, of highly differentiated modes of life between which there often is only the faintest communication, the greatest indifference, … occasionally bitter strife, but always the sharpest contrast. (Wirth 1938: 20) As the world moves towards its so-called urban 'tipping point', urbanization in the global South has increasingly come to be portrayed as the portent of a dystopian future characterized by ever-mounting levels of anarchy and brutality. The association between cities, violence, and disorder is not new, however. In a classic article on…/
The spatiality of violence in post-war cities
Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 2019
The world is urbanising rapidly and cities are increasingly held as the most important arenas for sustainable development. Cities emerging from war are no exception, but across the globe, many postwar cities are ravaged by residual or renewed violence, which threatens progress towards peace and stability. This collection of articles addresses why such violence happens, where and how it manifests, and how it can be prevented. It includes contributions that are informed by both postwar logics and urban particularities, that take intra-city dynamics into account, and that adopt a spatial analysis of the city. By bringing together contributions from different disciplinary backgrounds, all addressing the single issue of postwar violence in cities from a spatial perspective, the articles make a threefold contribution to the research agenda on violence in postwar cities. First, the articles nuance our understanding of the causes and forms of the uneven spatial distribution of violence, insecurities, and trauma within and across postwar cities. Second, the articles demonstrate how urban planning and the built environment shape and generate different forms of violence in postwar cities. Third, the articles explore the challenges, opportunities, and potential unintended consequences of conflict resolution in violent urban settings.
From ‘civil’ to ‘civic’ conflict? Violence and the city in ‘fragile states’
For a fleeting moment during the final decade of the twentieth century, the general trajectory of conflict across the world seemed clear. With the Cold War over, the number of interstate wars was in free-fall and the dominant form of violence was internal, within fragmenting states no longer propped up by their superpower sponsors. The age of 'total war' between states had thus been largely superseded by a wave of civil conflicts, often characterised as 'new wars', fought for the most part in rural hinterlands and widely considered as limited in scope and scale.
Urban restructuring, social economics and violence after conflict
Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 2019
This paper argues that the spatiality of violence needs to pay attention to the production of space as well as the nature of conflict in postwar conditions. Regimes of violence and how they live on in peace, emphasises the need to see how they are assembled in relation to economic, state and social processes implicated in placemaking. Coercion, control and surveillance are all part of the necessary assemblage of ethnic conflict, and in its aftermath, different forms of violence (or simply the threat of violence) reproduce identarian conflict and simultaneously exploit its reproduction. Liberal and increasingly neoliberal forms of peace fail to connect with the people and places most damaged by conflict and the relationship between poverty, sectarianism and place intensify the conditions for enduring forms of paramilitarism and ultimately violence. The paper draws on Belfast, Northern Ireland to argue that tackling the distinct economic conditions of the most marginal places is a critical but undervalued dimension of violence after peace. The analysis concludes by evaluating the potential of the Social and Solidarity Economy in transitional processes in which the relationship between violence, place and poverty are constitutive of embedded forms of materialist peacebuilding.
Peacebuilding , 2023
This special issue explores geographies of peace in violently contested cities – cities where the socio-political order is contested by actors who use violence and repression to either challenge or reinforce the prevailing distribution of power and political, economic, and social control. The articles within the special issue theorise and explore where, when, how, and why urban conflicts manifest themselves in the context of contested cities. Together, they also uncover strategies and mechanisms that can break dynamics of violence and repression, lead to urban coexistence, and generate peaceful relations in cities, grounding their analyses in rich case studies of different violently contested cities. The special issue thereby advances the research front on violently contested cities by studying their previously underexplored constructive potential. Bringing together different disciplinary perspectives, the special issue speaks to broader issues of conflicted and conflict-driven urbanisation, political violence in cities, and wider processes of urban change.
The Dialectics of Urban Form and Violence
Over a 50-year span, Institute of Development Studies (IDS) research has not focused on cities or urbanisation to the extent it might have. We find that there is good reason for cities to now be described as the ‘new frontier’ for international development. In particular, violence is increasingly a defining characteristic of urban living in both conflict and non-conflict settings. This has important consequences for the relatively under-researched links between urban violence, the processes of state building, and wider development goals. Benefiting from key IDS contributions to the debates on the security–development nexus, citizenship and the hybrid nature of the governance landscape, we argue that the moment is opportune for the Institute to deepen its research and policy expertise on urban violence ‘in the vernacular’.