Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This chapter addresses two ongoing government initiatives that form part of the psychological dimensions of urban warfare. One is an effort to mobilize the affective state of vigilance and the second is an effort to counter so-called radicalization. The chapter argues that these recently revamped urban security governance agendas further intervene on the levels of the body, the sensate, and the atmosphere. The chapter also brings questions of subjectivity to the fore, arguing that race, class, and gender are constantly renegotiated under the conditions of who feels in place or out of place in the city. The chapter ends by synthesizing how the discourses, material objects, bodies, and affects come together to shape atmospheric relations, arguing that such affective atmospheres are enrolled by the state to be at the front line of the battle against “the enemy within.”
This chapter considers everyday practices of undermining and undoing geopolitical violence and engaging with building the notion of everyday peace in the city. While Chapters 2 to 4 foreground how the logic of warfare and militarism becomes inscribed into the material, social, and sensorial fabric of the city, this chapter outlines forms of atmospheric labor as performative assembly of atmospheres of mutual interconnectedness and vulnerability. It addresses notions of embodied peace that are mobilized in cities to reshape war atmospherics, arguing that the spaces and practices involved in mitigating geopolitical violence are frequently overlooked and concealed.
“Banal warfare” describes the ways in which the vision of the city perpetually ridden with conflicts, terrorist attacks, and disease infuses everyday urban life to the point of becoming invisible or taken for granted. The book is situated within decolonial urbanism as, to understand the urban geopolitical struggles in western Europe, it employs the conceptual framework developed in relation to cities conventionally considered war cities in the global east and south. In “reversing the gaze” on urban warfare, the focus is on the impact of framing different public emergencies and incidents of violence in Paris and Brussels as acts of war and how this contributes to the normalization of militarism within urban contexts traditionally viewed as “non-war zones.” From lockdowns to states of emergency, the book addresses how this process shapes urban governance agendas, constructs the notion of the “enemy within,” and conditions the everyday affective atmospheres of urban dwellers in Paris and Brussels. These citizens are not presented as passive victims of military urbanism, but as active subjects in the doing and undoing of notions of cities at war. The book highlights the politics of affective atmospheres in an effort to “make feminist sense” of urban warfare, drawing attention to the processes that sustain social inequalities and deepen urban geographies of exclusion while, at the same time, rethinking notions of urban peace.
The concluding chapter highlights key features of the banality of urban warfare, which has become a protracted and durable condition through affective geographies and ways of feeling that accompany everyday life in the city. It further considers these developments as forms of urbicidal geographies and argues that the military logic underscoring notions of permanent threat supports an “us” versus “them” mentality, justifies the use of force and violence, and ultimately deepens social inequalities.
This chapter examines the material landscape through which the city of banal warfare is brought into being. The aim is to localize and ground discourses on urban warfare in the everyday environment, beyond the notions of emergency, exception, and crisis. Besides the more visible enactments of urban warfare, such as the deployment of military and heavily armed police on streets and the presence of military-grade equipment, attention is turned to seemingly more innocuous “flaggings” or reminders of urban threat, from bollards, trash cans, and plants to various advertisements. Moreover, the chapter addresses recent urban redevelopment initiatives that reinstate the notion of the city at war through capital-intensive private market interventions and neoliberal processes of gentrification.
The chapter begins by putting in relation war-torn global urban peripheries with metropolitan centers. It outlines the process of using cities in the Balkans, and throughout the global south, as epistemic sources for reconsidering the way these places are generative of new knowledge and approaches that reformulate our theories, concepts, and methodologies. Starting from this decolonial and relational urban geography, the chapter considers war not as a delimited violent event or a temporal suspension of “peaceful” social norms, but as a condition of life that continues to shape how cities are imagined, how they look, and how they feel. Inspired by feminist approaches, the chapter further specifies the use and usefulness of affective atmospheres as ways of inhabiting space and place that are laden with power.
The chapter traces the legal, political, and dominant media discourses that have shaped the narrative of urban warfare in the cities of Paris and Brussels throughout the 21st century. It focuses on the legal framework of state of emergency and the lockdown measure, implemented as responses to various events identified as a threat to public order in the two cities. The chapter shows the implementation of the military logic of urban governance, wherein a broad range of public emergencies and urban conflicts are treated as an act of war. The discursive framework on warfare plays a pivotal role in influencing public perception, policy decisions, and the very nature of imagining the city.
The COVID-19 pandemic generated crisis of 2020–1 could not be more different in content and character as compared with the crisis generated by Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine in early 2022. Nevertheless, having had in common a destructive impact on the global economy, both of these crises have further strengthened the dollar’s international dominance by further heightening uncertainty and an ensuing investor flight to safety. While the sanctions imposed on Russia have certainly given impetus to the de-dollarization initiatives of Russia and its allies, these initiatives will just as certainly have no discernible impact on the dollar’s dominance.
