Abstract
For those who have followed the recent boom of geographers writing on militarism and war, Stephen Graham’s work requires no introduction. In this wide-ranging book, he reassembles many of his recent writings, as well as an equal number of original chapters. One part critical guide to empire and one part Soldier of Fortune magazine, it leads readers on a riveting tour of the dystopian technologies developed by the United States and Israeli militaries and their contractors in order to keep the world at bay.
Three fundamental and useful arguments structure Cities Under Siege. The first is that despite an ‘imaginative separation’ there are always direct relationships between homelands and colonial frontiers (p. xix). The second is that the US and other militaries increasingly see cities as a threat and the primary field of battle. This has resulted in urbicide – war on cities – wherein security forces develop technologies and tactics in order to tame the city. If militaries once engaged with ‘the other’ on the wild frontier, today they attack it in both the mega-cities of the Global South and the inner cities of the North. ‘Synergies’ result as often identical tactics and technologies are put to use to subdue urban populations both at home and abroad. This leads to Graham’s third argument, that in order to understand the ‘new military urbanism’ we must put aside ‘traditional binaries of war and peace, the local and the global, the civil-sphere and the military sphere, the inside and outside of nation states’ (p. 294). Militarism, Graham argues, is all around us, in our cars, homes, and video games. By exploring militarism’s ubiquity, Cities Under Siege contributes greatly to breaking down received wisdom about the exceptionality of war and violence.
Despite its many strengths, like much of the recent work on militarism, Cities Under Siege is broader than it is deep. Graham bases most of his claims on secondary sources and journalists’ reports. While he argues that military urbanism occurs at more than just an ‘imaginary’ realm, because the book flits frequently from example to example, it never intensively investigates the production of many of the military technologies and tactics it describes. As a result, the new military urbanism seems much more Madison Avenue than it does Arlington, Virginia (although undoubtedly it is the product of both).
A bigger concern is whether new military urbanism is a useful concept. If we accept, as Graham does, that war and violence are intrinsic to capitalism, the state, colonialism, and urbanization, then is it appropriate to signal a shift to a new military urbanism? Graham acknowledges as much when he notes that the militarization of urban life ‘is far from new’ and that it instead suggests ‘contemporary twists to continual transformations’ (p. 60). Given this, it might be best to trace the historical geography of military urbanism alongside that of capitalism, colonialism, and the modern state. While this might seem like the quibble of a historical geographer, it signals a broader concern about the concept of militarization. What after all is militarization, if we have always been militarized?