African men in military gear standing in front of a rioting crowd

Geometry Problems: Future military interventions in the undivided African city

Danny Hoffman is the Bartley Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. An anthropologist and photojournalist by training, he is the author of two books on conflict and its aftermath in West Africa.

Update: this event has been moved to virtual, Zoom link below.

City Seminar 2021: The Divided City

What is an African city to a soldier?  The answer to this deceptively simple question will profoundly impact the lives of millions of people in the coming decades.  For much of the global military establishment, Africa’s urban spaces are becoming a problem at precisely the moment that security discourse is shifting from counterinsurgency to climate change and conventional peer-to-peer warfare.  What might recent events signal about the future direction of both foreign and domestic military engagements in African cities – and the consequences for those who live there?  Extreme forms of segregation were the heart of colonial and postcolonial security measures in African cities.  Is a different spatial order emerging for the continent’s urban battlespaces?

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