ABSTRACT
Cities today have become hotbeds of conflicts that may or may not have originated as a direct consequence of their structural, institutional, socio-cultural, or political processes but as part of their assimilation and integration in the larger geopolitical context. They provide a peculiar landscape in terms of how contemporary wars are thought and how the wars are fought. This chapter explores the linkages of cities, horizontally (tri-centric—people, power, property (the three Ps)) and vertically (tri-directional—national, regional, global) to gain a clearer understanding of urban armed conflicts. Rooted in an empirical analysis of some war-affected cities from Syria and Iraq, we aim to attain clarity on the political positionalities, strategies, and goals of various actors and their consequences for the cities. To facilitate this further, we develop an outline of the geopolitical urbanism network (GUN) framework, which highlights the multi-directionality of influences and pressures on cities, the plurality of actors operating, adaptive flexibility for interpreting newer challenges (such as the COVID-19 pandemic), and the commonality of it all for both, constructing conflict, and producing and sustaining peace in the cities. This we do with the hope that it may facilitate a methodological blueprint for future research and collective action.
