Military Geographies of Urban Space and War

Abstract

In military and academic circles, there is today an acknowledgment that war is urban and, for some commentators, that the urban also is war—in the sense of an ongoing militarization of cities and urban environments. Indeed, that war is (partly) urban has been the case for as long as humans have lived in cities and towns. What is new at present though is the recognized topicality of the manifold links between urban geographies and war. Until the last couple of decades, urban war and urban warfare were considered phenomena either of the past or of the future, but less of the present. It was only in the late 1990s and early 2000s that the significance of urban spaces in and of war became widely acknowledged, partly as an effect of military and everyday wartime experiences from places such as Grozny, Mostar, and Sarajevo. Other coinciding developments involve the post–Cold War revival of geopolitics, as well as emergent scholarly linkages between (critical) urban geopolitics, on the one hand, and studies of the military, war, and peace, on the other hand. However, this is not to say that military organizations themselves have not historically been preoccupied with urban spaces. With a focus on both intrastate and interstate urban conflict and urban war, the contribution at hand offers an understanding both of the academic study of military urban geographies and of military geographical approaches to and imaginaries of urban warfare and urban space (without going into military urban warfare practices as such). This is done over five sections, each with a specific theme that also illustrates the many links between academia and the military when it comes to cities and urban environments. The first section frames the topic. It offers a broad introductory perspective in the sense of an overview of academic literatures that are often combined in the scholarly study of military urban geographies. First are the conventional and the critical approaches, respectively, to military geography, and second is the literature on urban war that to a varying degree targets geographical aspects. The second section addresses in more depth conventional military geographical approaches to urban spaces, in a way that includes both academic works and military treaties and doctrines. The third section develops further conventional military geographical approaches to and imaginaries of urban space. It details some of the more recent military operational and strategic modes of imagining and approaching urban geographies. The fourth section shifts the focus back to the scholarly study of military urban geographies, but from critical perspectives. As further developed here, critical scholarship on the topic shifts attention to the conditions and effects of military presence on cities and urban spaces and to how military operations are both constituted by and constitutive of urban spaces and sites. The fifth and final section introduces a specific subtheme in critical scholarship on urban spaces in and of war: the literature on urbicide.