Geometry after the Circle: Security Interventions in the Urban Gray Zone

摘要

In August 2014, at the height of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Liberian health and security forces instituted an emergency armed quarantine around West Point, one of Monrovia's poorest neighborhoods. When West Point residents protested, security forces fought back, killing one person and injuring many more. The West Point quarantine is one of a number of recent notable cases of urban "gray zone" security operations. That amorphous term has been used to describe both tactics and territories that do not look like conventional urban theaters of war. Disease outbreaks such as Ebola, natural disasters such as the Haiti earthquake, or law enforcement operations like the arrest of Dudus Coke in Kingston, Jamaica, all seem to require extraordinary new capabilities for security forces. But actual gray zone operations are primarily carried out not by gray zone strategists but by "partner" forces, agents assumed to be more naturally capable of operating in the impossible environment of Global South cities. These surrogate war machines are, however, no less bound by the basic geometry of urban space and no less likely to produce the violent consequences of urban war.