Tracing and drawing together the precursors of contemporary approaches to urban security, Jon Coaffee offers an authoritative account of how the city irrevocably changed as a result of the mundane and exceptional measures introduced as a result of the U.S.-led War on Terror. Building on Professor Coaffees long-standing engagement with the field and marshalling and interrogating an unparalleled range of empirical studies and interdisciplinary insights from both before and since 11, this important book showcases how national governments, city administrations, technology companies, the military, policing and intelligence agencies, and citizens have become increasingly implicated into countering the enduring threat of urban terrorism. Informed by a range of critical social theory, this account further addresses important questions concerning the intensification of social control and surveillance and the reshaping of civic responsibility. At the same time, this unique analysis illuminates how ideas of militarism, preparedness, pre-emption and resilience have become institutionalised within systems of security governance and emerged as an integral part of normal everyday city life.
Pete Fussey, Professor of Criminology, University of Essex, United Kingdom.
Jon Coaffees most recent book is a timely and welcome addition to the Interventions book series. In this groundbreaking text, many of the conventions of IR and global politics are critically challenged as post-9/11 counter-terrorism interventions are interrogated and their implications for everyday life detailed. In this synthesis of critical theory and an understanding of security practices and behaviours across an ever-expanding range of security actors and civil society, a greater focus is placed on better understanding the role of securitys many audiences than in traditional scholarship. The result is a detailed rendering of the rescaling and refocusing of security concerns to the metropolitan level and below as a result of anxieties about new terrorism and the purported need to enhance resilience. Whether this is through concerns for the protection of vulnerable crowded locations, the lockdown security that has become an accepted part of staging high-profile events, attempts to counter the radicalisation and violent extremism of individuals and certain communities, the impact of state-level threats assessments and public warning and informing campaigns or the overlap between counter-terrorism and pandemic response practices; this book provides a grounded account of the importance of understanding how spaces of security have been steadily intensified over recent decades and the wider implications of this new normal for the securitisation of everyday life.
Nick Vaughan-Williams, Professor of International Security and Interventions book series editor, University of Warwick, United Kingdom.
The War on Terror and the Normalisation of Urban Security
This book explores the processes by which, in the 20 years after 9/11, the practices of urban security and counter-terrorism have impacted the everyday experiences of the Western city. Highlighting the localised urban responses to new security challenges, it reflects critically on the historical trajectory of techniques of territorialisation and physical protection, urban surveillance and the increasing need for cities to enhance resilience and prepare for anticipated future attacks and unpacks the practices and impacts of the intensification of recent urban security practices in the name of countering terrorism.
Drawing on over 25 years of research and practical experience, the author utilises a range of international case studies, framed by conceptual ideas drawn from critical security, political and geographical theory.
The book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, war studies, urban studies, geography, sociology, criminology, and the growing market of security and resilience professionals, as well as non-academic audiences seeking to understand responses to terrorist risk.
Jon Coaffee is a professor in Urban Geography in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom and is an international expert in counter-terrorism, security and urban resilience. His work includes Terrorism, Risk and the City (2003); The Everyday Resilience of the City: How Cities Respond to Terrorism and Disaster (2008), Terrorism, Risk and the Global City Towards Urban Resilience (2009), Sustaining and Securing the Olympic City (2011), Urban Resilience: Planning for Risk Crisis and Uncertainty (2016), Futureproof (2019) and Resilience and Planning: Plannings Role in Countering Terrorism (2020).
Interventions
The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to international relations and global politics. In our first 5 years we have published 60 volumes.
We aim to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics. Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics.
We are very happy to discuss your ideas at any stage of the project: just contact us for advice or proposal guidelines. Proposals should be submitted directly to the Series Editors:
- Jenny Edkins () and
- Nick Vaughan-Williams ().
As Michel Foucault has famously stated, knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting In this spirit The Edkins Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IRs traditional geopolitical imaginary.
Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawaii at Manoa, United States.
Edited by Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick
Emotional practices and listening in peacebuilding partnerships
The invisibility cloak
Pernilla Johansson
Subversive pedagogies
Radical possibility in the academy
Claire Timperley and Kate Schick
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/series/INT
The War on Terror and the Normalisation of Urban Security
Jon Coaffee
First published 2022
by Routledge
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2022 Jon Coaffee
The right of Jon Coaffee to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
