“Urbicide: The Killing of Cities?” David Campbell, Stephen S.D. Graham, and Daniel Bertrand Monk, Eds. Theory and Event 10, no. 2 (2007).
As traditional wars between nation states conducted in open terrain have become objects of relative curiosity, so the informal, ‘asymmetric’ or ‘new’ wars that centre on localized struggles over strategic urban sites have become the norm. The scale of global urbanization, combined with post-Cold War geopolitical upheaval, neoliberal economic restructuring, and a proliferation of well armed non-state militia, gangs, and paramilitaries, have forced what Appadurai has called an “implosion of global and national politics into the urban world.” This is a tendency that was anticipated by students of Clausewitz (like Delbruck, who first theorized an ermattungsstrategie, or strategy of attrition), as well as modernist theorists of war like Giulio Douhet and J.F.C. Fuller, who suggested that future warfare would target the city because its objective would be the destruction of the “civil will.”