1. Cities and the ‘War on Terror’
Imaginative Geographies, Inter-City
Relations and Political Violence
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University

2. Introduction
• Imaginative geographies of inter-city relations extremely
neglected
• Programmes of organised, political violence have always been
legitimized and sustained through complex imaginative
geographies of ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’
• Imperialist societies are constructed through normalizing, binary
judgements about both ‘foreign’ and colonized territories and
the ‘home’ spaces which sit at the ‘heart of empire’. Cities
key symbolic spaces.
• Stark binaries of urban place attachment, particularly at times of
war. As the geographer Ken Hewitt has argued, “war mobilizes
the highly charged and dangerous dialectic of place attachment:
the perceived antithesis of ‘our’ places or homeland and
‘theirs’”.

3. E.g. Bush Administration’s ‘War on Terror’
• State and media discourses produce “an unbridled
sentimentalizing of one’s own while dehumanizing the
enemy’s people and land. Seems an essential step in
cultivating readiness to destroy the latter” (Hewitt).
• General Sanchez: “every American needs to believe this;
that if we fail here in this [Iraqi] environment, the next
battlefield will be the streets of America.”
• Paul Bremer:“[We]would rather be fighting [the terrorists]
here [in Falluja] than in New York”
• Three key areas: ‘homeland’ cities, ‘target’ cities,
constructions of both within US military technoscience

4. (1) Re-imagining ‘Homeland’ Cities as
National Security Spaces
• "Everything and everywhere is
perceived as a border from
which a potentially threatening
Other can leap" (Hage).
• “Spread generalized
promiscuous anxiety through
the American populace, a
sense of imminent but inexact
catastrophe” (Raban).
• Major cuts in urban social and
policing Programmes

5. (i) Ubiquitous Terror Talk
• Endless flexibility of
‘terrorist’ labelling
• Absolute externality of
‘terrorist’
• State of eergency:Streams of
vague warnings, omnipresent
color coded alerts, and
endless media coverage of
purported threats to US
urban life
• Everyday events,
malfunctions or acts of
violence in the city are now
widely assumed be the
results of ‘terrorist’ action

6. (ii) Rebordering: The ‘Domestic Front’ in the “War on Terror”
• ‘Cracking down on diaspora’: Sally
Howell and Andrew Shryock
• ”Attempt to reconstitute the [United
States] as a bounded area that can be
fortified against outsiders and other
global influences. In this imagining of
nation, the US ceases to be a
constellation of local, national,
international, and global relations,
experiences, and meanings that
coalesce in places like New York City
and Washington DC; rather, it is
increasingly defined by a ‘security
perimeter’ and the strict surveillance of
borders" (Hyndman).

7. (iii) Anti-Cosmopolitan Reimaginations of
‘Homeland' Cities
• Tom Ridge “the only turf is
the turf we stand on”
• ‘Rebordered’ discourse
constructs an imaginary,
domesticated, singular, and
spatially fixed imagined
community of US nationhood
• Such an imagined community
contrasts starkly with
previous US state rhetoric
which centered on notions of
boundless mobility and
assimilation

8. • “Decidedly antiurban and anticosmopolitan ring” Kaplan
• ‘Clash of civilizations’ rhetoric “necessarily “requires that
cosmopolitan consciousness is ridiculed” Paul Gilroy
• The very term ‘homeland security’ shifts the emphasis
away from complex and mobile diasporic social formations,
sustaining large metropolitan areas, towards a much
clearer mapping which demarcates clear, essentialized
geographies of identity, entitlement and threat.
• “Folksy rural quality, which combines a German romantic
notion of the folk with the heartland of America to resurrect
the rural myth of American identity” (Kaplan)
• Precludes “an urban vision of America as multiple turfs
with contested points of view and conflicting grounds upon
which to stand” (Kaplan).

9. (iv) The ‘New Normalcy’:
Reimagining Everyday
Spaces and Systems
as Sources of
Boundless Threat

10. (v) New Urban
Technostructures:
New City ‘Walls’

11. (vi) Urban Design and
Planning for ‘Security’

12. (vii) Capsularisation and an Intensified
Militarisation of Material Culture

13. (viii) Repeated Invocations of Place Annihilation in
Neo-Republican Popular Geopolitical Fora

14. (2) ‘Terror Cities’: Orientalist Constructions of
Arab Urban Places as Military Targets
• ”Without a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like
‘us’ and didn’t appreciate ‘our’ values -- the very core of the Orientalist
dogma -- there would have been no war" in Iraq. Edward Said

15. (i) Unveiling Structureless, Intrinsically
Devious, Orientalised Cities

16. (ii) Vertical Representations of Arab Cities as
Collections of Military Targets
Reduces the “places and people you are about
to bomb, to targets, to letters on a map or coordinates on a visual display. Then, missiles
rain down on K-A-B-U-L, on 34.51861N,
69.15222E, but not on the eviscerated city of
Kabul, its buildings already devastated and its
population already terrorized by years of
grinding war” (Derek Gregory).

19. (iii) Systematic and Violent Denial and Erasure
of Ground Perspectives

20. (iv) Essentialising Arab Cities as ‘Terrorist Nests’
• E.g. Gen Richard Myers,
chair JCoS: Falluja a
"rat’s nest" or "hornet’s
nest" of "terrorist
resistance" against US
occupation that needed
to be "dealt with" .

21. (v) Islamophobic, Racist, Street-Level Military Discourses
• “The Iraqis are sick people and we are the chemotherapy”, ( New
Statesman in April 2003).
• “You have to understand the Arab mind. The only thing they
understand is force – force, pride and saving face” (Captain Todd
Brown, U.S. Fourth Infantry Division
• “Sand nigger’s”, “ragheads”, “towelheads”.

22. (vi) Constructing ‘Urban Warfare’
• E.g. Ralph Peters: Falluja a "terror-city"
• "This is the new reality of combat. Not only
in Iraq. But in every broken country, plague
pit and terrorist refuge to which our troops
have to go in the future”
• ”Global media” "a bonanza of terrorists
and insurgents" who were allowed to
"escape’ US forces in Fallujah in April 2004
• Thus, US forces "have to speed the kill”.
By "accelerating urban combat" to "fight
within the ‘media cycle,’ before
journalists” arrive, new technologies were
needed.
• “If we do not learn to kill very, very swiftly,
we will continue to lose slowly"

23. (vii) Othering by Simulation I : ‘Urban Warfare’ Video Games
“ The gaming industry’s latest fetish” (DelPiano)
“In a world being torn apart by
international conflict, one thing is on
everyone’s mind as they finish
watching the nightly news: ‘Man, this
would make a great
game!’” (Jenkins)
Andrew Deck: “calls forth a cult of
ultra-patriotic xenophobes whose
greatest joy is to destroy, regardless of
how racist, imperialistic, and flimsy the
rationale” for the simulated battle.

24. US Army “World’s Premiere Land Force”
• One of world’s biggest games
developers
• America’s Army
• Full Spectrum Warrior
• Even some video game reviewers
have commented that “this game
would have been fine without the
tawdry 4 letter words and negative
racist remarks” from the simulated
US soldiers

26. (viii) Othering by Simulation II : ‘Urban Warfare’ Training Sites
• 60 constructed around
the world
• Several shared with
Israel
• Minarets, calls to prayer,
donkeys, simulated smell
of rotting corpses

27. (3) Constructing ‘Homeland’ and ‘Target’
Cities
Within U.S. Military Techno-science & the
‘RMA’
• “The [US] Air Force wants to
be able to strike mobile and
emerging targets in fewer than
10 minutes so that such
targets will have no sanctuary
from US air power”, Adam
Hebert, (2003).
• Address both homeland cities
and the targeted, Arab cities,
in integrated ways. Both
emphasized as crucial
‘targets’ within one,
singular, urbanizing
‘battlespace’

28. • Huber and Mills: “Step by step, cities like New York must
now learn to watch and track everything that moves"
• "In the post-September 11 world," they write, ‘smart’
computerized systems need to be rolled out to all the
infra structural systems of urban America so that US
homeland security agencies can "see the plastic
explosives in the truck before they detonate, the anthrax
before its dispersed, the sarin nerve gas before it gets
into the air-conditioning duct"

29. "We really do want an Orwellian future
not in Manhattan, but in Kabul,"
”We [sic]can then project destructive power precisely,
judiciously, and from a safe distance week after week, year
after year, for as long as may be necessary. […] Properly
deployed at home, as they can be, these technologies of
freedom will guarantee the physical security on which all our
civil liberties ultimately depend. Properly deployed abroad,
they will destroy privacy everywhere we need to destroy it.
[…] At home and abroad, it will end up as their sons against
our silicon. Our silicon will win"

30. Persistent Area Dominance
• “Compressing the kill chain” “closes the time delay between sensor
and shooter” to an extent that brings “persistent area
dominance” (Hebert, 2003).
• E.g. ‘Success’ of 70 Predator assassination raids 2001• “Total Urban Dominance Layered System” (or TUDLS) deliver “a
family of integrated and complementary vehicles layered over an urban
area to provide persistent dominance” (ibid.).
• These dominators will be capable of completing the entire kill chain with
minimal human involvement” (Plenge, 2004).

34. Conclusions
• Bush Administration’s ‘war on terror’ rest fundamentally on
imaginative geographies: two-sided constructions of urban place
• Mutually constitutive representation of both ‘homeland’ and
‘target’ cities. Backed up by vast domain of symbolic and populargeopolitical violence
• Both constructions deeply anti-urban. One problematises urban
cosmopolitanism in ‘homeland cities’ and starves them of
resources
• The other uses the absolute externality of ‘‘terrorist’ labelling to
essentialise and reify the social ecologies of ‘target’ Arab cities in
profoundly racist ways to legitimise widescale state terror & war
crimes
• Inscribe biopolitical judgements: zoe vs.homo sacer; E.g. Reactions
to 100,000 iraqi civilian deaths vs. 150,000 Asian tsunami deaths

35. • Zulaika: Ultimate catastrophe is imitation
of Islamic fundamentalist terror
• Ill-defined enemies & goals
• Good (victim) versus-Evil Other
• Divine, theocratic backing
• Absolutist and fundamentalist
• States of exception, abandon rules of
engagement
• In radicalising many more potential
Islamic terrorists than Osama Bin Laden
could ever dream of, the danger is of
endlessly reproducing a vicious cycle of
atrocity: terror and state terror

36. •
•
•
•
•
•
But, these are imaginative
geographies
They are overlain by much
more complex geographies
of connection and
disconnection.
Global city networks
Media flows
Diasporic networks
Investment, finance,
resource flows
Neoliberal reconstruction
US military technoscience
itself