Before and after urban warfare: Conflict prevention and transitions in cities

The problem

Cities have a crucial place in the development path of fragile and conflict-affected States. Metropolitan areas, with their concentration of industrial and service sectors, are important engines for economic growth and productivity in developing countries.¹However, as urban population growth accelerates in many developing regions, the emerging consensus is that armed violence and conflict tend to increasingly affect these population centres, therefore jeopardizing broader national recovery and development.

The unprecedented pace of global population growth in cities has triggered fears of a potential increase in the frequency of such clashes in densely inhabited areas. This is linked, according to different sources, to increased demographic pressures on urban systems, combined with the attractiveness of such spaces for non-State armed groups. The two risk factors - rapid population growth and armed activity by non-State actors - are key conclusions from strategic studies of urban conflicts. While other factors, such as informational connectivity and State weakness, also play a role, the source of expanding scholarly and humanitarian concerns about urban conflict stems from these two dynamics. For instance, the concept of "hybrid war" was widely discussed during the conflict in eastern Ukraine starting in 2014, consisting of a combination of tactics used simultaneously "by both states and a variety of non-state actors", primarily in cities.²And one influential voice from the strategic/military studies field, David Kilcullen, has pointed out that "non-state conflicts (guerrilla, tribal, and civil wars, or armed criminal activity such as banditry and gang warfare) ... tend to happen near or within the areas where people live" - i.e., wars are taking place in "increasingly crowded, urban, coastal" areas.³

This linkage between urbanization and non-State armed activity is further strengthened by some of the "conflict economies" that have become associated with globalization. In defining "deviant globalization", the US National Defence University has highlighted the geographical (particularly urban) aspects of rogue non-State dynamics: criminal flows, it asserts, go through cities "in a de facto archipelago that runs from inner metropolitan cities of the United States to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the banlieues of Paris to the almost continuous urban slum belt that girds the Gulf of Guinea from Abidjan to Lagos".⁴A similar dynamic underlines the illicit profits...