November 2007

Robo-War Dreams: Global South Urbanisation and the US Military's 'Revolution in Military Affairs'

This article 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 urbanization. Through analyzing the discourses produced by US military commentators about "urban warfare," and the purported military and technological solutions that might allow US forces to dominate and control global south cities in the future, the paper demonstrates that such environments are being widely essentialized as spaces that necessarily work to undermine the US military's high-technology systems for surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting. The paper shows how, amid the ongoing urban insurgency in Iraq, wide-scale efforts are being made to "urbanize" these military systems so that US forces can attempt to assert high-tech dominance over the fine-grained geographies of global south cities in the future.

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