ABSTRACT
Several years ago, the media circulated news online that terrorists were targeting the world’s cities and that urban guerrilla warfare would be the way of the future. This predicament seems to have been borne out with the events of September 11, 2001 when a small band of terrorists killed nearly 3,000 civilians in New York City and transformed lower Manhattan into a zone of death and devastation. Other attacks on civilians in cities have since followed, from London (2005) to Mumbai (2008) and Moscow (2011), not to mention those in Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Terrorists have always had a preference for cities and civilians, from the Algerian war of independence when more bipartisan terrorist acts were aimed against urban colonial landmarks in Algiers to recent attacks in cities all over the world – from Baghdad to Tel Aviv, from Madrid to London and Bogota. The image of the city as a safe area governed by its citizens and protected by the police – an image that, in reality, may never have existed – has given way to another: the city and its inhabitants as the target of terrorists. Although terrorist attacks are the most spectacular, over the last two centuries many critics have denounced other forms of targeting. The city was said to be targeted by the state and its administrators, more recently by the military and, with the advent of economic globalism, by transnational companies and the media.
