Terrorism and the City
This panel invites papers that address how terrorism, whether historically or contemporarily, engages with and within the city. Sociologist Saskia Sassen argued in “When the City Itself Becomes a Technology of War” that asymmetrical military strategy has turned the space of the city itself into a technology of warfare. She writes that asymmetric warfare, the military strategy that defines U.S. engagement with terrorist cells across the world, are “partial, intermittent and lack clear endings…They are one indication of how the center no longer holds – whatever the center’s format: the imperial power of a period of the national state of our modernity” (36).