Cities at War: Global Insecurity and Urban Resistance

Warfare in the twenty-first century goes well beyond conventional armies and nation-states. In a world of diffuse conflicts taking place across sprawling cities, war has become fragmented and uneven to match its settings. Yet the analysis of failed states, civil war, and state building rarely considers the city, rather than the country, as the terrain of battle.

In Cities at War, Mary Kaldor and Saskia Sassen assemble an international team of scholars to examine cities as sites of contemporary warfare and insecurity. Reflecting Kaldor’s expertise on security cultures and Sassen’s perspective on cities and their geographies, they develop new insight into how cities and their residents encounter instability and conflict, as well as the ways in which urban forms provide possibilities for countering violence. Through a series of case studies of cities including Baghdad, Bogotá, Ciudad Juarez, Kabul, and Karachi, the book reveals the unequal distribution of insecurity as well as how urban capabilities might offer resistance and hope. Through analyses of how contemporary forms of identity, inequality, and segregation interact with the built environment, Cities at War explains why and how political violence has become increasingly urbanized. It also points toward the capacity of the city to shape a different kind of urban subjectivity that can serve as a foundation for a more peaceful and equitable future.

Mary Kaldor is professor of global governance and director of the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics. She is the coeditor of The Quest for Security: Protection Without Protectionism and the Challenge for Global Governance (Columbia, 2013, with Joseph Stiglitz) and the author of New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (2012, third edition) and Global Security Cultures (2018) among other works.

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and a member of the Committee for Global Thought at Columbia University. She is the author of many books, including Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (2014), The Global City (2001, second edition), and Cities in a World Economy (2018, fifth edition).