Metropolis

DEMODERNIZING BY DESIGN: WAR AND URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE seminar

Stephen Graham

This seminar will explore the emerging strategies, doctrines, techniques and discourses which surround state-backed warfare deliberately targeting urban infrastructure. In doing this, it an attempt to develop a preliminary and critical geopolitics of forced urban demodernisation in
the contemporary world. The discussion will have four parts. In the first,
I attempt to place forced urban demodernisation via infrastructural warfare and disconnection within a theoretical perspective. This stresses the connections between urban infrastructure, networked societies, and contemporary geopolitical power. Second, I briefly analyse two case studies of state infrastructural warfare which focus on the leading exponent of forced demodernisation as national strategy -- the current global and military hegemon, the United States. The case studies are the 1999 Kosovo intervention and the experience of war, sanctions, and more war in Iraq since 1991. Third, again using the United States as an example, I briefly discuss the embryonic emergence of state efforts to use computer networks to attack adversary societies. Finally, in the paper's conclusion, I reflect upon the geopolitics of forced urban disconnection, and demodernisation, within contemporary war and strategy.