Global Cities, Global (in)Securities: An Introduction

Abstract

The urban landscape is already the main center of social interaction in the globe since the vast majority of the world’s population inhabit cities. As the core of contemporary social life, urban areas concentrate most of the conflictive encounters opposing a great variety of actors. From small villages to major ‘Global Cities’ (Sassen 1991, 2005) and impres-sive megacities, urban space constitutes the main field in which political and economic endeavours take place. Therefore, it is not surprising that most of the crucial and more violent conflicts of our age occur in urban areas.It is true that cities and violence have a long and common old history (Ashworth 1991). Across the globe, and since ancient ages, cities have been the stage for protection as well as for pillage, massacres, upheavals, starvation, and military sieges. In Europe, cities had a crucial role in the process in which Modern States emerged. Then, fortified cities gave way to overpopulated urban spaces while the political, legal and military limits ex-panded until they were established along national borders (Tilly 1990). The emergence of interstate/international relations, as an immediate reflection of the political power cen-tralisation within the states, was accompanied by the elaboration of sophisticated legal and political-philosophical discourses that justified the existence of the state as the only entity capable of keeping internal peace and order in a troubled world (Neocleous 2014; Foucault 2003; Rodrigues forthcoming). However, the violent and tumultuous history of the nation-state is also the history of conflict and struggle within urban spaces.In the nineteenth century, the emergence of the so-called ‘total war era’ (Keegan 1993) transformed industrial cities into strategic sites in which the vast majority of economic,