2. • "If you want to destroy someone nowadays, you
go after their infrastructure" (Phil Agre 2001)
• "There is nothing in the world today that cannot
become a weapon" (Liang and Xiangsui, 1999)
• "Real security cannot be cordoned off. It is woven
into our most basic social fabric. From the post
office to the emergency room, from the subway to
the water reservoir" (Naomi Klein, 2001)
3. Networked Risks: Starting Points
• Socio-technical ‘hybrids’ through which Nature is continually
metabolized into Culture to literally produce the City
• Many scales and scapes of simultaneous and interacting
flows and connectivities
• Often taken for granted, ubiquitous, banalised.
• Revealed when they fail, are disrupted or deliberately
destroyed. "The normally invisible quality of working
infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks: the server is
down, the bridge washes out, there is a power
blackout" (Star, 1999).
• In urbanising ‘network societies’ crucial in mediating
construction and experience of hazards and risks
4. Hazards, Risks and Networked Urbanism
• Urbanites "are particularly at risk when their complex and
sophisticated infrastructure systems are destroyed and rendered
inoperable, or when they become isolated from external
contacts" (Barakat1998)
• ‘Natural’ hazard events distributed in space and time via
networked disruptions. Multiple orders of impacts caused by
disruption
• Current changes: privatisation/liberalisation? Just in Time flows:
tightly coupled systems
• Soon "people won't be able to just turn the machines off, because
they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would
amount to suicide" (Joy,2000).
5. “War in the Weirdly Pervious World” I:
Infrastructural Insurgencies
• ”Today, wars are fought not in
trenches and fields, but in living
rooms, schools and
supermarkets" (Barakat, 1998).
• War and geopolitical struggle are
increasingly being fought through
the infrastructures of everyday
urban life
• "The world struggle against
terrorists will continue because our
global economy simultaneously
creates many possible weapons
and angers many possible
enemies" (Luke, 2003)
9. “War in the Weirdly Pervious World” II:
State Infrastructural Warfare
• “It should be lights out in
Belgrade : every power grid,
water pipe, bridge, road and
war-related factory has to be
targeted. We will set your
country back by pulverizing
you. You want 1950 ? We can
do 1950. You want 1389 ? We
can do that, too!” (New York
Times Columnist, Thomas
Friedman, April 23rd, 1999)
10. “We have not run out of targets. Afghanistan has!”
Donald Rumsfeld
• "We need to study how to degrade
and destroy our adversaries'
abilities to transmit their military,
political, and economic goods,
services and information.
Infrastructures, defining both
traditional and emerging lines of
communication, present
increasingly lucrative targets for
airpower [The vision of] airmen
should focus on lines of
communications that will
increasingly define modern
societies" (Felker, 1998).
11. First Order Effects
Second Order Effects
Third Order Effects
No light after dark or in
Erosion of command and
Greater logistics complexity
building interiors
control capabilities
No refrigeration
Increased requirement for
Decreased mobility
power generating equipment
Some stoves/ovens non
Increased requirement for
Decreased Situational
operable
night vision devices
Awareness
Inoperable hospital electronic
Increased reliance on battery-
Rising disease rates
equipment
powered items for news,
broadcasts, etc.
No electronic access to bank
Shortage of clean water for
accounts/money
Rising rates of malnutrition
drinking, cleaning and
preparing food
Disruption in some
Hygiene problems
Increased numbers of non-
transportation and
combatants requiring
communications services
assistance
Disruption to water supply,
Inability to prepare and
Difficulty in communicating
treatment facilities, and
process some foods
with non-combatants
sanitation
12. Iraq 1991-2003: ‘Bomb Now, Die Later’
"Perhaps the real answer is that by declaring dualuse targets legitimate military objectives, the Air
Force can directly target civilian morale. In sum, so
long as the Air Force includes civilian morale as a
legitimate military target, it will aggressively
maintain a right to attack dual-use targets" (Rizer,
1998).
13.
14. Towards State ‘Computer Network Attack’
• ”Adversary military forces are ultimately an output or peripheral of a weapon
system and its sustaining, often civil, infrastructure. Corrupt the sustaining
systems and, like a driver deprived on his oxygen supply, the adversary
military force may be ineffective. Once the pattern of information-dependent
human activities is identified, the information target can be detected and
identified, and the data on which the activity is dependent could be
intercepted, destroyed, or corrupted by appropriate replacement
in peace and war" (Kelly, 1996).
15. Conclusions
• Must integrate networked infrastructures and networked
risks fully into conceptualisations of hazards, risks and
security
• Challenge many conventional understandings of
hazards
• Socio-technical and socio-natural perspectives blend
with critical geopolitics
• All networked connections provisional; require
continuous work; can easily shift to disconnection which
mediate and distribute hazards and risks; can easily be
manipulated or used as weapons of political violence
• Just the sort of innovative/ interdisciplinary agenda for
IHR squared?
