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Urban Conflicts
Urban Conflicts Liam O’Dowd, Queen’s University, Belfast, UK Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract Three sources of urban conflicts are identified: (1) changing state–city relationships; (2) the relationship between the dynamics of capitalist development and cities; and (3) the specific dynamics of urban life and the urban environment where the city itself is seen as a causal variable. Two sets of questions crosscut all three strands. The first addresses how violent conflicts can be regulated, transformed, and rendered into more constructive nonviolent conflicts through the processes of urban civil society. The second concerns how, why, and where urban conflicts turn violent and with what consequences. In summary, cities now rival states as arenas and stakes in political conflict and urban conflicts have an increasing transnational and transcultural salience, which underlines the necessity for more sustained comparative analysis.
Three Research Frameworks: An Introduction Urban conflicts have been framed and constituted historically by the making and unmaking of states, by changing patterns of economic development and by the specific effects of densely settled populations living in close proximity. As objects of research, they vary enormously across time and space, in terms of their causes, outcomes and the forms they assume. In order to make sense of a highly diverse and unwieldy research field, it is useful to identify three underlying frameworks of analysis, each of which sees urban conflicts as shaped by a different process or dynamic. These include (1) changing state–city relationships; (2) the dynamics of global capitalism; and (3) the specific dynamics of urban life and the urban environment. While these approaches may be distinguished in terms of what they choose to emphasize, in practice, i.e., in any one study, these processes may be frequently conceived as overlapping, intertwining or interpenetrating.
Violent and Nonviolent Urban Conflicts Implicitly at least, social scientific debates on all three processes distinguish between violent and nonviolent urban conflicts. In practice, however, the research and policy literature has been increasingly drawn to questions of urban violence, its causes, consequences, multiple forms, and how it might be defined, regulated, or transformed. Research on urban violence needs to be contextualized within a much wider social science tradition on the multiple origins, definitions, manifestations, and consequences of violence generally and the various ways in which it may be studied empirically (see Heitmeyer and Hagan, 2003). Understanding the scale, diverse manifestations, and variability of urban violence has become the touchstone of much research on urban conflicts. Muggah (2012), for example, provides a detailed overview of the global literature on urban violence and includes an annex, which lists the most prominent research networks and Internet resources on the topic (see also, World Bank, 2010; Agostini et al., 2010). At times, the problematizing of urban violence tends to obscure the fact that conflict per se is the sine qua non of urban life and that much of this conflict remains nonviolent, constructive, and agonistic rather than violent, destructive, and antagonistic.
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 24
Cities generally have a long history of managing nonviolent conflict and in creating institutions that regulate agonistic conflict. Cities’ association with the development of civil society is a recurring theme linking them to a capacity to ‘politicize’ or moderate conflicts among key violence-prone groups (Varshney, 2002; Keane, 2006). In his History of Violence, for example, Muchembled (2012) accords European towns of the Late Middle Ages, a precocious status in the ‘civilizing process’. He suggests that, through a form of ‘municipalization of violence’, they regulated and pacified those prone to disorder and violence such as young males, prostitutes, and criminals. Young males, however, continue to be seen as a problematic category, i.e., as perpetrators and victims of urban violence, both transhistorically and transculturally (Muggah, 2012: 48). Nevertheless, there is huge variability in rates of urban homicide, with dramatically declining rates in Europe over the past four centuries Muchembled (2012) and currently high rates in some Latin American and sub-Saharan cities (Muggah, 2012: 47–50). There is no unambiguous connection between cities and forms of conflict. On the one hand, cities can represent protection, safety, resilience, dense networks of reciprocity, economic productivity, and functioning welfare systems (formal and informal). On the other hand, they may be sites of extreme forms of violence, war, insecurity, inequality, poverty, and fear (Muggah, 2012: 2). In sum, much contemporary research on urban conflicts, across all three frameworks identified above, revolves around two sets of questions. The first addresses how violent urban conflicts can be regulated, transformed, and rendered into more constructive nonviolent conflicts through the processes of civil society. The second concerns how, why, and where conflicts turn violent and with what consequences? Agostini et al. (http:// www.eisf.eu/resources/item/?d¼41760), for example, seek to develop an analytical framework for understanding the processes of economic, political, and social violence by focusing on the interaction between risk factors in three cities: Nairobi, Kinshasa, and Bogota. The Urban Tipping Point research project led by Moser and Rodgers, studies four cities, Nairobi, Dili, Patna, and Santiago/Chile, in an attempt to understand how the conflicts in inherent in urban life (associated with poverty, youth, political exclusion, and gender-based insecurity) can tip
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over into generalized urban violence (http://urbantippingpoint. org). Violent urban conflicts are highly heterogeneous, multicausal, spatially uneven, and typically episodic. Moreover, they also generate long-term urban effects enhancing spatial segregation, discrimination, strengthening ethnic, class, gender, racial, and intergenerational divisions (Savage and Muggah, 2012: 3–4). Contemporary social research across the three frameworks identified above suggests that it utopian, however, to pursue some kind of urban or societal consensus aimed at ending urban conflict tout court. Programs of social homogenization and assimilation driven by projects of state and nationbuilding and capitalist development, almost by definition, are as likely to generate as to eliminate urban conflicts. Similarly, it is impractical to assume that strategies of urban planning, control, surveillance, or the use of lethal force have the capacity to ensure long-term urban stability. Coercive forms of domination inevitably produce collective resistance. The more constructive or agonistic urban conflicts are those that encourage negotiation, bargaining, and mutual respect among diverse groups as a means of combatting poverty, marginalization, and inequality. It remains difficult in practice, however, to disentangle urban conflicts from the often violent process of state formation and distintegration.
Changing City–State Relationships as a Source of Urban Conflicts As Tilly (1992) has shown, cities have long been integral to European state formation and the wars associated with it. In the era of city-states, urban conflicts were self-evidently state conflicts. With the emergence of the great overseas and land empires from the sixteenth century onward, and the spread of national states from 1945 onward, cities were increasingly contained and governed by overarching states. States, not cities, became the preeminent stakes in political conflict, the locus of military, political administrative, and ideological power and, additionally, the key regulators of economic power. Consequently, one of the major strands in urban research addresses how state formation and governance have become key determinants of conflict in cities. With accelerating urbanization globally, urban space is increasingly used to make political claims and urban conflicts are constituted by wider intra- and interstate conflicts (Savitch, 2008; Coward, 2009; Graham, 2010; Davis and Libertun de Duren, 2011; http://www.conflictincities.org). The proliferation of states (from 51 in 1945 to 193 in 2012) has generated much conflict (violent and otherwise) although the scale and intensity of this conflict has fluctuated considerably over space and time. In general, intrastate wars have predominated over interstate wars – the former accounting for an estimated 16.2 million deaths, the latter for 3.3 million deaths in the 60 years after 1945 (Fearon and Laitin, 2003). With the increasing urbanization of the world’s population, and the pivotal economic, administrative, and symbolic roles that cities play in national states and in the global, geopolitical system, the changing relationship between cities and organized political violence has come in for increased scrutiny (Graham, 2010; Gregory, 2010; Coward, 2009). Cities have become key sites for
the assertion, erosion, and contestation of state sovereignty (Beall and Fox 2009; Davis and Libertun de Duren 2011). According to Graham (2010), the geopolitics of interstate war has generated a new military urbanism, where the city is a ‘battle space’ provoking a new emphasis on securitization. Here the historical capacity of the most powerful states to externalize organized political violence is undermined, as their own cities become key frontiers of terrorism, counterinsurgency, and crime prevention. Cities, here, are largely, if not exclusively, seen as the pawns or the victims of the various protagonists of interstate and intrastate wars. While the number of UN recognized states have multiplied, they vary hugely in terms of their infrastructural power (economic, political, ideological, and military). This impacts on their capacity to control, respond to, or exacerbate urban conflicts on home territory or in other, weaker states – for example, in the Middle East, the Balkans, or Africa (Graham, 2010; Beall et al., 2013). As Mann (2012) argues, the core states most deeply embedded in the global capitalist economy in the West, wield greatest infrastructural power. More recently established, poorer states in the Global South or in the historic frontier zones or peripheries of historic empires (Anderson, 2008; O’Dowd, 2012) are less capable of regulating urban conflicts. Weak ‘infrastructural power’ can be a recipe for generating fear, insecurity, and uncertainty in cities which, in turn, become factories of irregular forms of pro- and antistate violence ranging from criminal activity to organized conflict rooted in ethnic, racial, national, or religious antagonisms (www.conflictincities.org; Bollens, 2007). Such cities risk becoming ‘decivilized’ by new and repressive forms of communitarianism, and routinized informal violence in everyday life. An alternative understanding of the state–city interface finds in the very vulnerability and complexity of large cities, antidotes or capacities to combat or decompose organized political violence over the state. Here the totalizing and polarizing thrust of much state-related violence finds an antidote in the differentiating capacities of cities, their shared institutions of civil society, innovative forms of economic development, creativity, and mutual interdependence, and their shared rules for governing relationships between culturally diverse populations (Varshney, 2002; Sassen, 2010). Cities in this view have the potential to be sites of regulated public contest between multiple groups struggling for power, recognition, inclusion, and self-affirmation. ‘Open cities’, lodged in complex global interurban interconnections (economic, political, and cultural) also have the potential to help create a transnational civil society, which promises to moderate, if not eliminate, wars over bordered national states.
Capitalist Dynamics and Urban Conflicts A second strand of research emphasizes the rise of neoliberal capitalism globally and the way in which it has diminished the role of states in shaping urban conflicts since the 1980s. The state–city interface is now seen to be no longer so important as commodification, privatization, and deregulation reduce the capacity of states to provide urban social services or mitigate enhanced socioeconomic inequalities. These trends are most apparent in the weaker, more fragile states of the Global South,
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faced by unprecedented urban growth. As cities are reordered according to the logic of the neoliberal market, states are less likely to be a focus for individual or collective demands for citizenship rights. Urban conflicts become more fragmented and differentiated in everyday struggles over housing, clean water, schools, policing, physical safety, and the right to use the streets to make a livelihood (Bayat and Biekart, 2009). State accountability becomes an ever more remote prospect in urban contexts formed by a kaleidoscope of corporate interests, corrupt states, pro- and antistate paramilitaries, rival gangs, and informal urban settlements sustained by subsistence economies. At one level, then, cities are conceptualized as key drivers of economic growth and urbanization, i.e., as central to the operations of corporate capitalism, the rise of megacities and the restructuring, segmentation, or hollowing out the power of national states (Taylor, 2004; Harvey, 2012; Sassen, 2012 – for a critique of this perspective, see Therborn, 2011). At another level, these same cities are the sites of hugely diverse, and often violent, urban conflicts rooted in ever-widening social disparities. Seen through this lens, urban conflicts are fundamentally capitalist conflicts and, directly or indirectly, manifestations of class struggle. Harvey (2012: 5) argues that contemporary cities have arisen through the geographical and social concentration of a surplus product and that capitalism needs urbanization to absorb the surplus product that it continually produces. The control over the disbursement of surplus, including the ownership and control of cities, typically lies in few hands (Harvey, 2008: 24). Capitalist crisis polarizes wealth further and produces cities that are kept under constant surveillance in gated communities and privatized public spaces (2012: 15). Drawing on Lefebvre, Harvey (2012: 25) recognizes that there are a multitude of diverse struggles over ‘the right to city’ but he goes beyond the theorists of agonistic pluralism to hold out the prospect of an emergent unity that would pit the ‘People’ against the ‘Party of Wall Street’ (2012: 164). For Harvey, gaining control of “the inner connection between urbanization and surplus production and use” (2012: 25), can contribute to the overthrow of contemporary finance capitalism. From this perspective, the significant urban conflicts are viewed through the lens of class struggle over property, human rights, and other urban resources. This allows for a transhistorical and transcultural approach, which can applied, for example, to the evolution of the Western capitalist city, the colonial city, and the rapidly developing cities of the Global South in the twenty-first century. There is a substantial comparative and historical literature on urban riots that explores the complex ways in which class divisions interact with other social divisions – how economic inequality fuses with other factors ethnic, racial, gender, and political divisions to fuel periodic, if recurring, violent conflict (e.g., Gilje, 1996; Arrom and Ortoli, 1996; Brass, 1996). Some of this comparative research also addresses state–city relations, notably the issue of policing (Waddington et al., 2009) and the existence of urban-level ‘riot systems’ (Brass, 1996) while at the same time, recognizing the way in which these issues are framed by a wider economic system that generates social inequality and exclusion. Writers, such as Wacquant (2008), concentrating on Western Europe and North America, study the scope, spread,
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and intensity of marginality or socioeconomic seclusion in the city. Here too capitalism shapes the state, but the latter is a more coherent force than its counterpart in the Global South. Wacquant (2008) contrasts the experience of the American city, where ethnicity is amplified by the state and trumps class, with the Western European city where ‘class’ (and the classstructured state) in the key determinant of social segregation and marginalization as in the multinational French banlieue riots of 2005 (see also, SSRC, http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org). US literature on urban riots, for example, tends to concentrate on the nexus in the inner city between race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic inequality and the responses of the police and legal system. In the French suburban riots of 2005, Wacquant (2008) portrays the state’s role as more direct as it has been shaped by historical forms of institutionalized forms of class conflict that have forced it to mitigate urban inequality through universalist social provision or targeted interventions. Wacquant here adopts a Bourdieusian or Weberian approach to the city that sees it as site where various forms of capital – economic, cultural, social, and symbolic – are accumulated in ways that are shaped by the state. For him, the struggle to claim or protect these forms of urban capital is at the root of urban conflict. There is a huge and varied tradition of empirical research on urban conflicts that does not link them directly to class struggle in the strictly Marxist sense. For these studies, capitalist dynamics are mediated through a complex of specific local, regional, and historical structures of power, domination, and resistance. They conceptualize the city more as a dependent rather than an independent variable in its own right (see framework three below). The focus is on how imperatives of commodification working through urban planning, tourism, property development, gentrification, inward investment, and big sports projects dramatically displace and relocate disadvantaged populations (including migrants), the homeless, the poor, and the disabled from desirable urban sites (e.g., Marcuse and Van Kempen, 2002). Infrastructure may be conceived as a material manifestation of urban conflicts typically resolved in favor of the powerful (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012) or resisted (sometimes temporarily) by the disadvantaged and the poor. Thus, the gated communities, the wealthy suburbs, the banal, and homogenized urban public spaces are one side of a process driven by a desire on the part of elites and middle classes to distance themselves from direct social contact with the ‘dangerous’ classes because of the latter’s proclivities to criminality, disease and violence. The deep and multiple social inequalities that flow from the capitalist system may be experienced differently in working class Parisian suburbs than in the favelas and shantytowns of the new megacities, however. Local and regional differences remain significant in shaping the form of urban conflicts. For example, there are no counterparts in Middle Eastern cities to the lethal drug gang wars in Mexican and other Latin American cities (Rodgers, 2009; Molloy, 2013). Similarly, the conflicting urban fiefdoms of Beirut or the struggle between fundamentalists and secularists in Cairo have their own regional specificities. Nevertheless, the long history and contemporary prevalence of urban riots, protests, racial, ethnic, and sectarian conflicts, gang warfare and criminality may be interpreted as struggles over unequal economic, political, and cultural resources.
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Two of the major theorists of urban conflicts, David Harvey (2012) and Manuel Castells (2012) provide somewhat different perspectives on these conflicts although both recognize the ubiquitous influence of neoliberal capitalism. The former emphasizes the primacy of ‘class struggle’, however, where the latter stresses power inequalities. Harvey continues to emphasize the direct link between urban protests and the contemporary crisis of finance capitalism – assimilating them under the banner of the collective ‘right to the city’. Castells’ (1983, 2012) work, on the other hand, has moved away from his early structuralist analysis of the capitalist system and the specificity of the ‘urban’ (Castells, 1977), to the comparative study of urban social movements. He conceives these as grassroots phenomena, that are spontaneous, often temporary or transient, and prone to co-option or disappearance. He argues that they continue to challenge the multiple structures and forms of power and domination to be found in cities across the globe. For Castells, however, these urban conflicts are less coherent and more unpredictable, than in Harvey’s analysis that links them rather more directly to the nexus between urbanization and capital accumulation.
The ‘City’ as a Source of Urban Conflicts The third research strand draws on theories of the ‘urban’ per se, where the city itself is treated as a causal variable in generating and shaping distinctive patterns of human behavior and culture (Wirth, 1938; Jacobs, 1961). This approach has been typically associated with periods where cities develop highly visible characteristics that sharply distinguish them from their immediate hinterlands (or the rest of state territory) – for example, Chicago in the early twentieth century, the colonial city at the zenith of Western imperialism and colonialism, and more recently, the rapidly expanding cities in ‘developing’ countries. Within this framework, urban conflicts are seen to arise directly from the sociospatial and physical environment. Alternatively, anthropologists ascribe to cities a mythology, charisma, or soul, which help to constitute their particular urban conflicts (e.g., Hansen and Verkaaik, 2009). While these perspectives accord cities an integrity and distinctiveness of their own that is not reducible to political economy, they also acknowledge the impact of the state and economy on urban conflicts. The association of cities with conflict, violence, disorder, poverty, and a range of other social problems is rooted in the Western intellectual response to the growth of the industrial city. Moral outrage over the ills and evils of urban life have typically shaded from ambivalence into outright antiurbanism (White and White, 1962; Williams, 1973) in the context the portrayal of social change as framed by rural–urban, country–city, and gemeinschaft– gesellschaft distinctions. Angotti’s (2006) critique of Davis (2006) has trenchantly argued that this tradition continues to survive in contemporary Western views of the megacities of the Global South. These analyses tend to see cities as ‘things’ that produce all manner of urban ills (including mass poverty, violence, and disorder) rather than as complex sets of social relationships, which provide multiple opportunities for progressive, grassroots urban movements to oppose oppression and create democratic institutions.
The most systematic and empirically grounded example of the tradition that sees the city as an independent variable in its own right remains the work of the Chicago School of Sociology (1890–1940). This culminated in Wirth’s (1938) famous theoretical synthesis. Wirth proposed a universalist definition of the city as a “relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement(s) of social heterogenous individuals” (1938: 8) that produced varied forms of social disorganization, conflict and ‘deviant behavior’. Although much criticized for their reliance on biological/ecological metaphors and its conservative and ethnocentric biases (e.g., Rodgers, 2010), the influence of the Chicago survives in many social scientific and planning approaches to the city. The ‘Chicago’ approach also pioneered the practice of according ‘exemplar’ or ‘paradigmatic’ status to key cities (Beauregard, 2003), because they are deemed to be stereotypical or generic, archetypal, or prototypical – a trend setter (Brenner, 2003: 208). This approach is an attempt to impose a degree of analytical manageability and coherence on the huge population of highly diverse historical and contemporary cities. Typologies (either explicit or implicit) are thereby generated while a small number of key exemplars of each type get intensive research scrutiny. Contemporary examples include the ‘global city’, the capitalist city, the industrial city, the ‘(post)modern city’, the ‘fundamentalist city’, the ‘postsecular city’, ‘contested cities’, and ‘cities of the Global South/North’. These conceptualizations influence the interpretation of urban conflicts deemed to be characteristic of each type. Anthropologists typically rely on ‘cultural’ analyses to provide more holistic interpretations of cities and their complex conflicts. For example, Hansen and Verkaaik (2009) employ the concept of urban charisma as embedded in people, things, places, and situations (2009: 8). They suggest that the urban must be understood as “a way of being in the world, as a dense and complex cultural repertoire of imagination, fear and desire” (2009: 5). As such urbanism is defined differently than in the Chicago School – cities are not reducible to their functions or the dynamics of their social networks rather they should be understood at several levels as (1) sensory regimes; (2) specific forms of knowledge and intelligibility; and (3) specific forms of power, connectivity, and possibility. The key charismatic urban individuals or urban specialists – big men, hustlers, brokers, even criminals who have extralocal links to centers of power and who link informal urban life to its formal institutions. They register, facilitate and mediate the constant conflicts over urban space between rich and poor, planners and pavement dwellers (2009: 11). In the process, they give cities a form of unity in the face of their multiple conflicts and fissiparous tendencies.
Summary The research traditions identified above often overlap in practice yet they reveal three important analytical options in the search for the source of urban conflicts. Whether the source is located in state–city relationships, the global capitalist economy, or the city as a distinctive material and social phenomenon, has farreaching implications for understanding the substance and
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potential significance of urban politics. The examples discussed under each heading are merely illustrative of a vast and complex field. While much of this literature has its provenance in the ‘West’, there is an overall tendency across the three approaches to encompass the study of urban conflicts within an overarching global framework. Nevertheless, the three approaches identified above do not embrace all the relevant literature on urban conflicts notably that which accords more significance to individuals. Gupte (2012), for example, argues that collectivist terms such as ethnic and communal violence might be replaced by the term ‘civil violence’ which accommodates a more microperspective that better accommodates the agency of individuals. Karl-Dieter Opp (2009) also advances a more capacious framework that synthesizes a range of disciplinary perspectives on political protest and social movements while advancing a structuralcognitive model of his own. This framework seeks to make explicit links between macrostructural perspectives and microperspectives focused on why people participate in different forms of social protest. However, Opp does not link protests and social movements explicitly and systematically to cities or the urban environment. Urban conflicts have an increasing transnational and transcultural resonance. Despite their vast differences, cities in the Internet age are now embedded in global networks, which make the performance of some urban conflicts iconic and instantly communicable. These conflicts also highlight shifting relationships between violent and nonviolent strategies. Wars are increasingly urban. Cities now rival states as arenas and stakes in political conflict. Struggles between rich and poor, AlQaeda bombing campaigns, the ‘Arab Spring’ protests, the ‘occupy’ movements, drugs wars in Latin America or sectarian violence in Asia and Africa all demand specific historical analysis. However, they are also reshaping cities in recognizable patterns that demand more sustained comparative study.
See also: Agonism; Conflict and Consensus; Ethnic Conflicts; Nation-State and War; Territorial Conflicts; Violence, History of; Violence: Public.
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Abstract Three sources of urban conflicts are identified: (1) changing state–city relationships; (2) the relationship between the dynamics of capitalist development and cities; and (3) the specific dynamics of urban life and the urban environment where the city itself is seen as a causal variable. Two sets of questions crosscut all three strands. The first addresses how violent conflicts can be regulated, transformed, and rendered into more constructive nonviolent conflicts through the processes of urban civil society. The second concerns how, why, and where urban conflicts turn violent and with what consequences. In summary, cities now rival states as arenas and stakes in political conflict and urban conflicts have an increasing transnational and transcultural salience, which underlines the necessity for more sustained comparative analysis.
Three Research Frameworks: An Introduction Urban conflicts have been framed and constituted historically by the making and unmaking of states, by changing patterns of economic development and by the specific effects of densely settled populations living in close proximity. As objects of research, they vary enormously across time and space, in terms of their causes, outcomes and the forms they assume. In order to make sense of a highly diverse and unwieldy research field, it is useful to identify three underlying frameworks of analysis, each of which sees urban conflicts as shaped by a different process or dynamic. These include (1) changing state–city relationships; (2) the dynamics of global capitalism; and (3) the specific dynamics of urban life and the urban environment. While these approaches may be distinguished in terms of what they choose to emphasize, in practice, i.e., in any one study, these processes may be frequently conceived as overlapping, intertwining or interpenetrating.
Violent and Nonviolent Urban Conflicts Implicitly at least, social scientific debates on all three processes distinguish between violent and nonviolent urban conflicts. In practice, however, the research and policy literature has been increasingly drawn to questions of urban violence, its causes, consequences, multiple forms, and how it might be defined, regulated, or transformed. Research on urban violence needs to be contextualized within a much wider social science tradition on the multiple origins, definitions, manifestations, and consequences of violence generally and the various ways in which it may be studied empirically (see Heitmeyer and Hagan, 2003). Understanding the scale, diverse manifestations, and variability of urban violence has become the touchstone of much research on urban conflicts. Muggah (2012), for example, provides a detailed overview of the global literature on urban violence and includes an annex, which lists the most prominent research networks and Internet resources on the topic (see also, World Bank, 2010; Agostini et al., 2010). At times, the problematizing of urban violence tends to obscure the fact that conflict per se is the sine qua non of urban life and that much of this conflict remains nonviolent, constructive, and agonistic rather than violent, destructive, and antagonistic.
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 24
Cities generally have a long history of managing nonviolent conflict and in creating institutions that regulate agonistic conflict. Cities’ association with the development of civil society is a recurring theme linking them to a capacity to ‘politicize’ or moderate conflicts among key violence-prone groups (Varshney, 2002; Keane, 2006). In his History of Violence, for example, Muchembled (2012) accords European towns of the Late Middle Ages, a precocious status in the ‘civilizing process’. He suggests that, through a form of ‘municipalization of violence’, they regulated and pacified those prone to disorder and violence such as young males, prostitutes, and criminals. Young males, however, continue to be seen as a problematic category, i.e., as perpetrators and victims of urban violence, both transhistorically and transculturally (Muggah, 2012: 48). Nevertheless, there is huge variability in rates of urban homicide, with dramatically declining rates in Europe over the past four centuries Muchembled (2012) and currently high rates in some Latin American and sub-Saharan cities (Muggah, 2012: 47–50). There is no unambiguous connection between cities and forms of conflict. On the one hand, cities can represent protection, safety, resilience, dense networks of reciprocity, economic productivity, and functioning welfare systems (formal and informal). On the other hand, they may be sites of extreme forms of violence, war, insecurity, inequality, poverty, and fear (Muggah, 2012: 2). In sum, much contemporary research on urban conflicts, across all three frameworks identified above, revolves around two sets of questions. The first addresses how violent urban conflicts can be regulated, transformed, and rendered into more constructive nonviolent conflicts through the processes of civil society. The second concerns how, why, and where conflicts turn violent and with what consequences? Agostini et al. (http:// www.eisf.eu/resources/item/?d¼41760), for example, seek to develop an analytical framework for understanding the processes of economic, political, and social violence by focusing on the interaction between risk factors in three cities: Nairobi, Kinshasa, and Bogota. The Urban Tipping Point research project led by Moser and Rodgers, studies four cities, Nairobi, Dili, Patna, and Santiago/Chile, in an attempt to understand how the conflicts in inherent in urban life (associated with poverty, youth, political exclusion, and gender-based insecurity) can tip
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over into generalized urban violence (http://urbantippingpoint. org). Violent urban conflicts are highly heterogeneous, multicausal, spatially uneven, and typically episodic. Moreover, they also generate long-term urban effects enhancing spatial segregation, discrimination, strengthening ethnic, class, gender, racial, and intergenerational divisions (Savage and Muggah, 2012: 3–4). Contemporary social research across the three frameworks identified above suggests that it utopian, however, to pursue some kind of urban or societal consensus aimed at ending urban conflict tout court. Programs of social homogenization and assimilation driven by projects of state and nationbuilding and capitalist development, almost by definition, are as likely to generate as to eliminate urban conflicts. Similarly, it is impractical to assume that strategies of urban planning, control, surveillance, or the use of lethal force have the capacity to ensure long-term urban stability. Coercive forms of domination inevitably produce collective resistance. The more constructive or agonistic urban conflicts are those that encourage negotiation, bargaining, and mutual respect among diverse groups as a means of combatting poverty, marginalization, and inequality. It remains difficult in practice, however, to disentangle urban conflicts from the often violent process of state formation and distintegration.
Changing City–State Relationships as a Source of Urban Conflicts As Tilly (1992) has shown, cities have long been integral to European state formation and the wars associated with it. In the era of city-states, urban conflicts were self-evidently state conflicts. With the emergence of the great overseas and land empires from the sixteenth century onward, and the spread of national states from 1945 onward, cities were increasingly contained and governed by overarching states. States, not cities, became the preeminent stakes in political conflict, the locus of military, political administrative, and ideological power and, additionally, the key regulators of economic power. Consequently, one of the major strands in urban research addresses how state formation and governance have become key determinants of conflict in cities. With accelerating urbanization globally, urban space is increasingly used to make political claims and urban conflicts are constituted by wider intra- and interstate conflicts (Savitch, 2008; Coward, 2009; Graham, 2010; Davis and Libertun de Duren, 2011; http://www.conflictincities.org). The proliferation of states (from 51 in 1945 to 193 in 2012) has generated much conflict (violent and otherwise) although the scale and intensity of this conflict has fluctuated considerably over space and time. In general, intrastate wars have predominated over interstate wars – the former accounting for an estimated 16.2 million deaths, the latter for 3.3 million deaths in the 60 years after 1945 (Fearon and Laitin, 2003). With the increasing urbanization of the world’s population, and the pivotal economic, administrative, and symbolic roles that cities play in national states and in the global, geopolitical system, the changing relationship between cities and organized political violence has come in for increased scrutiny (Graham, 2010; Gregory, 2010; Coward, 2009). Cities have become key sites for
the assertion, erosion, and contestation of state sovereignty (Beall and Fox 2009; Davis and Libertun de Duren 2011). According to Graham (2010), the geopolitics of interstate war has generated a new military urbanism, where the city is a ‘battle space’ provoking a new emphasis on securitization. Here the historical capacity of the most powerful states to externalize organized political violence is undermined, as their own cities become key frontiers of terrorism, counterinsurgency, and crime prevention. Cities, here, are largely, if not exclusively, seen as the pawns or the victims of the various protagonists of interstate and intrastate wars. While the number of UN recognized states have multiplied, they vary hugely in terms of their infrastructural power (economic, political, ideological, and military). This impacts on their capacity to control, respond to, or exacerbate urban conflicts on home territory or in other, weaker states – for example, in the Middle East, the Balkans, or Africa (Graham, 2010; Beall et al., 2013). As Mann (2012) argues, the core states most deeply embedded in the global capitalist economy in the West, wield greatest infrastructural power. More recently established, poorer states in the Global South or in the historic frontier zones or peripheries of historic empires (Anderson, 2008; O’Dowd, 2012) are less capable of regulating urban conflicts. Weak ‘infrastructural power’ can be a recipe for generating fear, insecurity, and uncertainty in cities which, in turn, become factories of irregular forms of pro- and antistate violence ranging from criminal activity to organized conflict rooted in ethnic, racial, national, or religious antagonisms (www.conflictincities.org; Bollens, 2007). Such cities risk becoming ‘decivilized’ by new and repressive forms of communitarianism, and routinized informal violence in everyday life. An alternative understanding of the state–city interface finds in the very vulnerability and complexity of large cities, antidotes or capacities to combat or decompose organized political violence over the state. Here the totalizing and polarizing thrust of much state-related violence finds an antidote in the differentiating capacities of cities, their shared institutions of civil society, innovative forms of economic development, creativity, and mutual interdependence, and their shared rules for governing relationships between culturally diverse populations (Varshney, 2002; Sassen, 2010). Cities in this view have the potential to be sites of regulated public contest between multiple groups struggling for power, recognition, inclusion, and self-affirmation. ‘Open cities’, lodged in complex global interurban interconnections (economic, political, and cultural) also have the potential to help create a transnational civil society, which promises to moderate, if not eliminate, wars over bordered national states.
Capitalist Dynamics and Urban Conflicts A second strand of research emphasizes the rise of neoliberal capitalism globally and the way in which it has diminished the role of states in shaping urban conflicts since the 1980s. The state–city interface is now seen to be no longer so important as commodification, privatization, and deregulation reduce the capacity of states to provide urban social services or mitigate enhanced socioeconomic inequalities. These trends are most apparent in the weaker, more fragile states of the Global South,
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faced by unprecedented urban growth. As cities are reordered according to the logic of the neoliberal market, states are less likely to be a focus for individual or collective demands for citizenship rights. Urban conflicts become more fragmented and differentiated in everyday struggles over housing, clean water, schools, policing, physical safety, and the right to use the streets to make a livelihood (Bayat and Biekart, 2009). State accountability becomes an ever more remote prospect in urban contexts formed by a kaleidoscope of corporate interests, corrupt states, pro- and antistate paramilitaries, rival gangs, and informal urban settlements sustained by subsistence economies. At one level, then, cities are conceptualized as key drivers of economic growth and urbanization, i.e., as central to the operations of corporate capitalism, the rise of megacities and the restructuring, segmentation, or hollowing out the power of national states (Taylor, 2004; Harvey, 2012; Sassen, 2012 – for a critique of this perspective, see Therborn, 2011). At another level, these same cities are the sites of hugely diverse, and often violent, urban conflicts rooted in ever-widening social disparities. Seen through this lens, urban conflicts are fundamentally capitalist conflicts and, directly or indirectly, manifestations of class struggle. Harvey (2012: 5) argues that contemporary cities have arisen through the geographical and social concentration of a surplus product and that capitalism needs urbanization to absorb the surplus product that it continually produces. The control over the disbursement of surplus, including the ownership and control of cities, typically lies in few hands (Harvey, 2008: 24). Capitalist crisis polarizes wealth further and produces cities that are kept under constant surveillance in gated communities and privatized public spaces (2012: 15). Drawing on Lefebvre, Harvey (2012: 25) recognizes that there are a multitude of diverse struggles over ‘the right to city’ but he goes beyond the theorists of agonistic pluralism to hold out the prospect of an emergent unity that would pit the ‘People’ against the ‘Party of Wall Street’ (2012: 164). For Harvey, gaining control of “the inner connection between urbanization and surplus production and use” (2012: 25), can contribute to the overthrow of contemporary finance capitalism. From this perspective, the significant urban conflicts are viewed through the lens of class struggle over property, human rights, and other urban resources. This allows for a transhistorical and transcultural approach, which can applied, for example, to the evolution of the Western capitalist city, the colonial city, and the rapidly developing cities of the Global South in the twenty-first century. There is a substantial comparative and historical literature on urban riots that explores the complex ways in which class divisions interact with other social divisions – how economic inequality fuses with other factors ethnic, racial, gender, and political divisions to fuel periodic, if recurring, violent conflict (e.g., Gilje, 1996; Arrom and Ortoli, 1996; Brass, 1996). Some of this comparative research also addresses state–city relations, notably the issue of policing (Waddington et al., 2009) and the existence of urban-level ‘riot systems’ (Brass, 1996) while at the same time, recognizing the way in which these issues are framed by a wider economic system that generates social inequality and exclusion. Writers, such as Wacquant (2008), concentrating on Western Europe and North America, study the scope, spread,
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and intensity of marginality or socioeconomic seclusion in the city. Here too capitalism shapes the state, but the latter is a more coherent force than its counterpart in the Global South. Wacquant (2008) contrasts the experience of the American city, where ethnicity is amplified by the state and trumps class, with the Western European city where ‘class’ (and the classstructured state) in the key determinant of social segregation and marginalization as in the multinational French banlieue riots of 2005 (see also, SSRC, http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org). US literature on urban riots, for example, tends to concentrate on the nexus in the inner city between race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic inequality and the responses of the police and legal system. In the French suburban riots of 2005, Wacquant (2008) portrays the state’s role as more direct as it has been shaped by historical forms of institutionalized forms of class conflict that have forced it to mitigate urban inequality through universalist social provision or targeted interventions. Wacquant here adopts a Bourdieusian or Weberian approach to the city that sees it as site where various forms of capital – economic, cultural, social, and symbolic – are accumulated in ways that are shaped by the state. For him, the struggle to claim or protect these forms of urban capital is at the root of urban conflict. There is a huge and varied tradition of empirical research on urban conflicts that does not link them directly to class struggle in the strictly Marxist sense. For these studies, capitalist dynamics are mediated through a complex of specific local, regional, and historical structures of power, domination, and resistance. They conceptualize the city more as a dependent rather than an independent variable in its own right (see framework three below). The focus is on how imperatives of commodification working through urban planning, tourism, property development, gentrification, inward investment, and big sports projects dramatically displace and relocate disadvantaged populations (including migrants), the homeless, the poor, and the disabled from desirable urban sites (e.g., Marcuse and Van Kempen, 2002). Infrastructure may be conceived as a material manifestation of urban conflicts typically resolved in favor of the powerful (Rodgers and O’Neill, 2012) or resisted (sometimes temporarily) by the disadvantaged and the poor. Thus, the gated communities, the wealthy suburbs, the banal, and homogenized urban public spaces are one side of a process driven by a desire on the part of elites and middle classes to distance themselves from direct social contact with the ‘dangerous’ classes because of the latter’s proclivities to criminality, disease and violence. The deep and multiple social inequalities that flow from the capitalist system may be experienced differently in working class Parisian suburbs than in the favelas and shantytowns of the new megacities, however. Local and regional differences remain significant in shaping the form of urban conflicts. For example, there are no counterparts in Middle Eastern cities to the lethal drug gang wars in Mexican and other Latin American cities (Rodgers, 2009; Molloy, 2013). Similarly, the conflicting urban fiefdoms of Beirut or the struggle between fundamentalists and secularists in Cairo have their own regional specificities. Nevertheless, the long history and contemporary prevalence of urban riots, protests, racial, ethnic, and sectarian conflicts, gang warfare and criminality may be interpreted as struggles over unequal economic, political, and cultural resources.
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Two of the major theorists of urban conflicts, David Harvey (2012) and Manuel Castells (2012) provide somewhat different perspectives on these conflicts although both recognize the ubiquitous influence of neoliberal capitalism. The former emphasizes the primacy of ‘class struggle’, however, where the latter stresses power inequalities. Harvey continues to emphasize the direct link between urban protests and the contemporary crisis of finance capitalism – assimilating them under the banner of the collective ‘right to the city’. Castells’ (1983, 2012) work, on the other hand, has moved away from his early structuralist analysis of the capitalist system and the specificity of the ‘urban’ (Castells, 1977), to the comparative study of urban social movements. He conceives these as grassroots phenomena, that are spontaneous, often temporary or transient, and prone to co-option or disappearance. He argues that they continue to challenge the multiple structures and forms of power and domination to be found in cities across the globe. For Castells, however, these urban conflicts are less coherent and more unpredictable, than in Harvey’s analysis that links them rather more directly to the nexus between urbanization and capital accumulation.
The ‘City’ as a Source of Urban Conflicts The third research strand draws on theories of the ‘urban’ per se, where the city itself is treated as a causal variable in generating and shaping distinctive patterns of human behavior and culture (Wirth, 1938; Jacobs, 1961). This approach has been typically associated with periods where cities develop highly visible characteristics that sharply distinguish them from their immediate hinterlands (or the rest of state territory) – for example, Chicago in the early twentieth century, the colonial city at the zenith of Western imperialism and colonialism, and more recently, the rapidly expanding cities in ‘developing’ countries. Within this framework, urban conflicts are seen to arise directly from the sociospatial and physical environment. Alternatively, anthropologists ascribe to cities a mythology, charisma, or soul, which help to constitute their particular urban conflicts (e.g., Hansen and Verkaaik, 2009). While these perspectives accord cities an integrity and distinctiveness of their own that is not reducible to political economy, they also acknowledge the impact of the state and economy on urban conflicts. The association of cities with conflict, violence, disorder, poverty, and a range of other social problems is rooted in the Western intellectual response to the growth of the industrial city. Moral outrage over the ills and evils of urban life have typically shaded from ambivalence into outright antiurbanism (White and White, 1962; Williams, 1973) in the context the portrayal of social change as framed by rural–urban, country–city, and gemeinschaft– gesellschaft distinctions. Angotti’s (2006) critique of Davis (2006) has trenchantly argued that this tradition continues to survive in contemporary Western views of the megacities of the Global South. These analyses tend to see cities as ‘things’ that produce all manner of urban ills (including mass poverty, violence, and disorder) rather than as complex sets of social relationships, which provide multiple opportunities for progressive, grassroots urban movements to oppose oppression and create democratic institutions.
The most systematic and empirically grounded example of the tradition that sees the city as an independent variable in its own right remains the work of the Chicago School of Sociology (1890–1940). This culminated in Wirth’s (1938) famous theoretical synthesis. Wirth proposed a universalist definition of the city as a “relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement(s) of social heterogenous individuals” (1938: 8) that produced varied forms of social disorganization, conflict and ‘deviant behavior’. Although much criticized for their reliance on biological/ecological metaphors and its conservative and ethnocentric biases (e.g., Rodgers, 2010), the influence of the Chicago survives in many social scientific and planning approaches to the city. The ‘Chicago’ approach also pioneered the practice of according ‘exemplar’ or ‘paradigmatic’ status to key cities (Beauregard, 2003), because they are deemed to be stereotypical or generic, archetypal, or prototypical – a trend setter (Brenner, 2003: 208). This approach is an attempt to impose a degree of analytical manageability and coherence on the huge population of highly diverse historical and contemporary cities. Typologies (either explicit or implicit) are thereby generated while a small number of key exemplars of each type get intensive research scrutiny. Contemporary examples include the ‘global city’, the capitalist city, the industrial city, the ‘(post)modern city’, the ‘fundamentalist city’, the ‘postsecular city’, ‘contested cities’, and ‘cities of the Global South/North’. These conceptualizations influence the interpretation of urban conflicts deemed to be characteristic of each type. Anthropologists typically rely on ‘cultural’ analyses to provide more holistic interpretations of cities and their complex conflicts. For example, Hansen and Verkaaik (2009) employ the concept of urban charisma as embedded in people, things, places, and situations (2009: 8). They suggest that the urban must be understood as “a way of being in the world, as a dense and complex cultural repertoire of imagination, fear and desire” (2009: 5). As such urbanism is defined differently than in the Chicago School – cities are not reducible to their functions or the dynamics of their social networks rather they should be understood at several levels as (1) sensory regimes; (2) specific forms of knowledge and intelligibility; and (3) specific forms of power, connectivity, and possibility. The key charismatic urban individuals or urban specialists – big men, hustlers, brokers, even criminals who have extralocal links to centers of power and who link informal urban life to its formal institutions. They register, facilitate and mediate the constant conflicts over urban space between rich and poor, planners and pavement dwellers (2009: 11). In the process, they give cities a form of unity in the face of their multiple conflicts and fissiparous tendencies.
Summary The research traditions identified above often overlap in practice yet they reveal three important analytical options in the search for the source of urban conflicts. Whether the source is located in state–city relationships, the global capitalist economy, or the city as a distinctive material and social phenomenon, has farreaching implications for understanding the substance and
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potential significance of urban politics. The examples discussed under each heading are merely illustrative of a vast and complex field. While much of this literature has its provenance in the ‘West’, there is an overall tendency across the three approaches to encompass the study of urban conflicts within an overarching global framework. Nevertheless, the three approaches identified above do not embrace all the relevant literature on urban conflicts notably that which accords more significance to individuals. Gupte (2012), for example, argues that collectivist terms such as ethnic and communal violence might be replaced by the term ‘civil violence’ which accommodates a more microperspective that better accommodates the agency of individuals. Karl-Dieter Opp (2009) also advances a more capacious framework that synthesizes a range of disciplinary perspectives on political protest and social movements while advancing a structuralcognitive model of his own. This framework seeks to make explicit links between macrostructural perspectives and microperspectives focused on why people participate in different forms of social protest. However, Opp does not link protests and social movements explicitly and systematically to cities or the urban environment. Urban conflicts have an increasing transnational and transcultural resonance. Despite their vast differences, cities in the Internet age are now embedded in global networks, which make the performance of some urban conflicts iconic and instantly communicable. These conflicts also highlight shifting relationships between violent and nonviolent strategies. Wars are increasingly urban. Cities now rival states as arenas and stakes in political conflict. Struggles between rich and poor, AlQaeda bombing campaigns, the ‘Arab Spring’ protests, the ‘occupy’ movements, drugs wars in Latin America or sectarian violence in Asia and Africa all demand specific historical analysis. However, they are also reshaping cities in recognizable patterns that demand more sustained comparative study.
See also: Agonism; Conflict and Consensus; Ethnic Conflicts; Nation-State and War; Territorial Conflicts; Violence, History of; Violence: Public.
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