Between Ferality and Resilience: Global (South) Urbanization as a Counterinsurgency Research Object

Abstract

Today, urbanization is described as one of the major global challenges. The rapid demographic transformations taking place in certain regions of the Global South — especially in countries of Africa and Southeast Asia — bring a sense of urgency to the discussion on cities. Rapid and uncontrolled urbanization in Global South, combined with social inequalities, poverty and environmental degradation, renders many urban populations vulnerable and precarious. With an emphasis on the urban expansion of the Global South, an international agenda is formed nowadays, focusing on the structural functions of the cities and their shielding against the negative effects of the current global crisis; a crisis taking today the form of an economic, environmental, and migration crisis. Thus, sustainability and resilience of the cities, and especially of those in the Global South, are turned into the key questions of urban planning and urban governance policies. Yet, they are also gradually turned into an object of military problematizations, as Western armed forces are strongly interested today in the urban phenomena and the functions of the cities, perceiving urban environment not only as a potential field of military operations but as a source of irregular threats; describing, in other words, the cities of the Global South not only as sites that host potential enemies but as enemies per se. More specifically, from the end of the 20th century U.S. military focuses on urban informality and its security implications, imposing a new understanding of the urban world. This is today more evident, as rapid demographic changes render urban systems and informal urban settlements in particular more vulnerable, and this vulnerability is directly problematized in public security terms. Through the relevant anti-urban theoretical frameworks, the cities of the Global South are conceived as feral systems that have to be tamed; and this taming calls for direct intervention. Military imposes, in this way, its presence in the field of urban problematizations, and building on the deception of contemporary neoliberal narratives calls today for urban resilience. As the world urbanizes rapidly and the notions of crisis and emergency are shaping the dominant social imaginary and the modern governmental agenda, urban sustainability, adaptability, and resilience are turned into an overall public security issue and eventually into an object of military interest. Hence, when the military theorists wonder how to make contemporary “fragile” urban systems more “resilient”, they actually wonder how to build forcibly resilient subjectivities and impose, after all, resilience and patience against an inescapable oppression.