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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Stephen Graham
This paper seeks to open up to critical scrutiny the attempts currently being made to re-engineer post-cold war US military power to directly confront global south urbanisation. Through analysing the discourses produced by US military commentators about 'urban warfare', and the purported military, technological and robotic solutions that might allow US forces to dominate and control global south cities in the near to medium-term future, the paper demonstrates that such environments are being widely essentialised as spaces which necessarily work to undermine the USA's military's high-technology systems for surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting. The paper shows how, amid the ongoing urban insurgency in Iraq, widescale efforts are being made to 'urbanise' these military systems so that US military forces can attempt to assert high-tech dominance over the fine-grained geographies of global south cities in the future. This includes an examination of how, by 2007, US forces, in close collaboration with the Israeli military, had already begun to implement ideas of robotised or automated urban warfare to counter the complex insurgencies in Iraq. The paper concludes with a critique of the urban and robotic turns in US military doctrine.
Author(s): Graham S
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: City
Year: 2008
Volume: 12
Issue: 1
Pages: 25-49
Print publication date: 01/04/2008
Date deposited: 17/03/2010
ISSN (print): 1360-4813
ISSN (electronic): 1470-3629
Publisher: Routledge
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604810801933511
DOI: 10.1080/13604810801933511
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