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Humanism and Terror: Scoping
the Problem of Violence On Early 21st Century Planet Earth
Ben Wisner
bwisner@igc.org
bwisner@igc.org
Visiting Research Fellow
Development Studies Institute
London School of Economics
October 2001
I have studied natural hazards for 35 years. I have focused on the ways that families,
communities, cities plan for and cope with extreme events such as drought, flood, storm,
and earthquake. From these years of work some general observations emerge and stand in
possible contrast to what one is likely to find when thinking more deeply about the terror
attack on the World Trade Center.
Nature's harm, human violence.
Despite the grievous injuries and deaths caused by natural hazards, their effects are not
spoken of or thought of as "violence". Some authors anthropomorphize, speaking
of "the earth's violent forces" or "nature's fury", but we all know
that these are figures of speech. Nature causes harm. Only we human beings do violent acts
to our fellow humans.
How we "live with"
hazards. Although some natural hazards (such as earthquakes as opposed to most
volcanic eruptions and most weather extremes) are very sudden and give little or no
warning, most people have learned to "live with" these occurrences. They
"take precautions" and get on with their lives. There is little evidence that
people living near the San Andreas or Anatolian faults or on coasts exposed to hurricanes
live in constant fear. In fact, it is a challenge of risk communication and public
education to motivate people to continue to take precautions in between events.
Societal adaptations to hazards.
In the presence of recurrent natural hazards societies adapt. Adaptations are
technological and social changes whose aim is to reduce the impact of hazards. They
typically become part of routine practice, whether this is the grazing pattern of nomadic
pastoralists or the construction practices of urban industrialists. Such routines become
unconscious, they become "normal" practice. To that extent the social group
become, incrementally, more resilient and less vulnerable to the natural hazard. Houses
are commonly built on raised mounds in Bangladesh. It is "normal" house building
practice, and it is also part of a strategy of flood proofing. In industrial society
"normal" practice is often enforced by law as "standard" practice.
Hence building codes and their enforcement are generally though to explain the great
difference in lives lost when comparing earthquakes such as Northridge (1994) and Seattle
(2001) or even Kobe (1995, with its 6,000 dead) with Kocaeli (Turkey, 1999) and Gujarat
(2001).
The role of technology and
science. During the 19th and 20th Centuries, developments in science and
technology (earth science, engineering, public health, etc.) have played an important role
in the mitigation of natural hazards. However, concomitant patterns of urbanization, land
use, increased energy consumption, and extension of infrastructure has also increased the
vulnerability of technologically dependent societies to disruptions and even to
cataclysmic failure. Also, on a case by case basis, it is clear that high levels of
technological development often leads to the potential for cascading secondary hazards
following primary events such as earthquakes or floods. These take the form of explosions,
fires, release of hazardous materials, and disruption on lifeline infrastructure.
Does the study of society's response to
natural hazards have anything to contribute to understanding and preventing future
catastrophes like the attack on the World Trade Center?
What? Varieties of harm, violence, and terror. Distinction between violence and
terror.
Nature causes harm, not violence. Nature does not act. Animals do not act. Humans do. An
act implies intentionality. The harm causes by nature is the result of processes, extreme
events, not acts (although human acts or failures to act play a role in acerbating and
distributing the impacts of an extreme natural event). This is true even when the flayed
and broken remains of human beings resulting from a flash flood or tsunami can be as
horribly disfigured than victims of bomb blast or arson.
Of course this distinction is obvious. But the more significant point is that this
distinction is deeply embedded in all cultures and belief systems. It is somehow easier
for us to grieve and yet to accept the extreme natural events that cut lives short on
planet earth. We may become very angry about the failure of authorities to provide social
protection, adequate warning, or sufficient recovery assistance. We may seek the
"root causes" of vulnerability of certain groups rather than others to such
extreme natural events (poverty, gender, age or ethnic discrimination, etc.). We may blame
history, class society, or the mayor, but we generally do not blame nature.
It is different with human acts. There are accidental deaths, manslaughter, deaths by
misadventure. A drunk driver will be blamed and punished. So, sometimes, will be a
negligent factory manager or CEO responsible for failed infrastructure causing a railway
disaster, due to willful neglect [1]. Yet these acts are not violent acts, only
irresponsible and perhaps culpable ones.
Violent acts are intentional. Harm is intended. There is "malice with
foresight." I want to leave aside the most common cases of interpersonal violence
[2]. We have all felt a surge of anger against another. We have mostly not acted upon it,
striking or intentionally harming the other. So much misery of domestic violence falls
into this category. So, too, perhaps, some "unintended" violence in a robbery
"gone wrong" where the intention was not to do physical harm although in the
heat of the moment, bodily harm was done [3].
From the point of view of understanding if and how "the world has changed" since
the World Trade Tower attack and what insight the study of natural hazards can bring to
this appalling event, it is necessary to move on to forms of "organized"
violence.
"Organization" is a tricky word. The molecules going down the bath plug are
"organized" and so is a platoon of soldiers, and so was one of Stalin's
concentration camps, and so, it appears, were the highjackers on 11 September.
Briefly, then it will be necessary somewhere else, at greater length, to work through the
ways that several kinds of organized violence have (or perhaps have not) caused protective
adaptations in human society and the eventual consequence this has had on the way we live
our lives in space, the way we travel, how we trade, immigrate, build and dwell in our
cities, and whom we love and hate [4].
Some types of crime involve organized
violence. The mafia and drug trade are examples. Gangs engage in ritual violence of a type
to retain territorial and economic supremacy that often claims "non combatant"
lives, children, for example, caught in the cross fire in drive by shootings [5].
Crimes against humanity are, by
definition, a species of organized violence. The rape camps in Bosnia, the mass execution
of boys and men during various phases of the wars in the Balkans, the horrors of the
Nazi's "final solution", the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, are all well
known examples [6].
Warfare is also organized violence.
Much has been made of the fact that in the 20th Century warfare has targeted more and more
civilians as opposed to combatants [7]. The London blitz, fire bombing of Dresden and
other German cities, fire bombing of Tokyo, and finally the use of the atom bomb on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki set the stage, mid century, for the massive loss of civilian lives
in Indochina, and, more recently, wars in Africa, Central America, the Balkans, Central
Asia and the Middle East [8]. In some cases there has been the argument advanced that the
explicit intention was not to harm civilians, but that they were unfortunately living too
close to the strategic military target (a rail depot, factory, or harbor, for example) or
that, as was said of some of the "stray" cruise missiles in Iraq, there is bound
to be unintended "collateral damage" in warfare.
Poverty is organized violence, or some
argue that it is, using the term "structural violence" to refer to historically
established patterns of privilege and lack of privilege, access and marginality, power and
powerlessness [9]. This perspective has been influential in the study of the wealth and
poverty of nations, the critique of the social impacts of globalization, as well as the
sociological and geographical analysis of the distribution within nations, areas, cities
of wealth, income, disease, living conditions. As in the case of warfare, some would say
that there is no legally or morally identifiable intention to do harm to a particular
person. Like "collateral damage", there are what regional economists have called
"backwash" effects of growth and modernization. There are "winners"
and "losers." [10]
State terror is also organized
violence. In his book, Humanism and Terror [11], French intellectual of the left, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, tried to make sense of the violence used by Stalin as a routine practice of
state power. This was a time, in the late 1940s, when the true extent of the horrors of
the deportations and labor camps, the gulag archipelago, political show trials and
executions was first becoming known outside the USSR. Terror, in this sense, differs from
common crime, crimes against humanity, warfare and poverty. The main difference is its
complete randomness and indiscrimination. The threat lies constantly overhead in every
aspects of daily life. "The walls have ears" and can denounce you, even from
within the privacy of your bedroom. Your innocence or guilt is not relevant, nor are any
reasonable precautions. You cannot move to a safer city, "away from the front
line". You cannot seek charity, development assistance, or join a self-help group.
Nothing can protect you except complete, unrelenting acceptance of external command and
authority.
Cult based [12] terror is a similar
form of organized violence. It is this like kind of organized violence that those who
attacked the World Trade Center seem to have been perpetrating. The goal is to undermine
"normality" and destabilize the spatial and social patterns we take for granted
in daily life. It too is totalitarian in the same way that Stalin's reign of terror was
totalitarian. The only protection, or so the perpetrators would have us believe, is
turning away from our godless ways and submission to external command and authority, that
of their particular interpretation divinity, the metaphysics and morality that they
believe goes with it. The difference between cult based and state terror is a matter of
scale, of the presence or absence of a bureaucratic apparatus of support for its actions,
and the presence, in the case of state terror, of an underlying nationalistic project and
ideology [13].
The question, of course, is whether they
are wrong. General opinion is that they are wrong. There are ways of "combating"
terrorism and of protecting our cities and ourselves. But if that is so, then it is
necessary to understand in more depth the causes of this particular kind of organized
violence, its relations to the others, and just how urban life, in particular, must change
in order to achieve, if possible, new kinds of adaptation to a new sort of hazard.
How? Terror's effects. The experience of terror vs. fear, and its effects on daily
life.
Are not randomness, uncertainty, unpredictability, and non-discrimination features,
precisely of terror? No natural hazard event is truly random. They are known to one degree
or another. Lisbon in 1755 had already experienced damaging earthquake. More and more is
known about even the most sudden and destructive natural events. People and cities can
take precautions. They "live with" natural hazards, not in constant fear of
them. So, too, robberies, muggings, arson and other criminal violence. People take
precautions and so does society [14]. In fact, to some extent some social groups have
developed ways of leading "normal" lives in the midst of extreme political
violence such as under apartheid in South Africa and a variety of dictatorships [15].
Natural hazard, street crime, and technological failure are also, to one degree or
another, discriminatory as relates to their victims. A large earthquake in the 1970s in
Guatemala was called a "class quake" by the on the streets because most of the
dead and injured were low income, indigenous Mayan Guatemalans whose could not afford
houses that are more stable against seismic motion. A very large literature demonstrates
the specific social, cultural, and economic characteristics that make this or that group
more vulnerable in this or that flood, storm, epidemic, or other extreme natural event.
So, too, the literature on environmental justice shows that people living closest to
hazardous and dangerous chemical plants, waste incinerators, nuclear power stations, etc.
tend to be low income people, often of some minority religious or ethnic background, and
certainly with little access to political power.
Most common crime such as mugging and robbery is directed by the poor against the poor in
most cities of the world. Upper income and elite groups can fall victim, but they are
statistically less likely to, and their homes, journeys to work, and their workplaces are
highly protected. The art and science of "defensible space", the extreme example
of which (for better or worse) is the gated community, has arisen as a growth industry.
It is perhaps least possible for many people to "live with" the technologies
that have been imposed by modernism, especially chemical and nuclear facilities. These
endemic fears have been disparaged as irrational, as needlessly "amplified" and
manipulated by media and special interests, as mismanaged by poor public relations and the
failure to educate sufficiently about science and technology. The fact remains that again
and again the "impossible" happens, and petroleum, chemical, and nuclear
facilities fail (Guadalajara, Mexico City, Elizabeth NJ, Bhopal, Chernobyl, Three Mile
Island, Toulouse, Flixboro, the EXXON Valdez). Each time simple, unpredictable cause (a
six pack of beer, a paper tag covering a blinking light) or a series of large and small
events have caught regulators, managers, engineers, and the public unawares.
Where? Cities at risk.
Terrorism in the 20th and 21st Centuries seems to be mostly an urban phenomenon. It is not
only the city that is at risk, but urbanism. Many major cities have suffered such attacks
within the past two decades, including Tokyo, Colombo, Paris, London, Buenos Aires,
Bogotá, Nairobi, and Cape Town.
The hazard of such random and indiscriminate violence is one of a very long and growing
list of natural, technological, and social hazards that affect cities, especially the
growing number with large concentrations of people (281 with more than one million
inhabitants) [16].
Endemic fear the unpredictable, random and dimensionless violence may empty out the public
spaces, the piazzas, gardens, and quays as it has so far reduced airline travel and
tourism. Suspicion and surveillance could replace one of urban life's greatest pleasures,
anonymous mingling.
Professor Solanka, who thought of himself as egalitarian by nature and
a
born-and-bred metropolitan of the countryside-is-for-cows persuasion,
On parade days strolled cheek by jowl among his fellow citizens.
One Sunday he rubbed shoulders with slim-hipped gay-pride prancers,
The next weekend he got jiggly beside a big-assed Puerto Rican girl
wearing her national flag as a bra. He didn't feel intruded upon amid
these multitudes; to the contrary. There was a satisfying anonymity in
the crowds, and absence on intrusion. [17]
One of the more troubling likely consequences of a decrease of urban multicultural
solidarity and tolerance, of increasing isolationism and division, decrease of
neighborhood community is that it is precisely such these that constitute vital social
capital for coping with natural hazards that threaten cities in the 21st Century. A number
of international research projects during the period of the International Decade for
Natural Disaster Reduction have shown that preparedness, response, mitigation, and
recovery from storms, floods, and earthquakes in large cities depends largely on the
capacities of local government entities (less on national and international actions) and,
above all, the relationship between local governments and an organized neighborhood based
civil society [18].
Why? Who engages in terror as organized violence, and why?
Do acts of random violence, mass and individual, not boil down to individual mental
illness [19], or, at least, a problematic human weakness for self-deception and
indoctrination? [20]
What is the difference, psychologically speaking, between the weaknesses that allowed the
captain of the EXXON Valdez to drink heavily on duty that night off the coast of Alaska
and the weaknesses that allowed the 19 hijackers of aircraft on 11 September, 2001, to
become members and true believers in a cult of death? Or the people who committed the gas
attack on the Tokyo subway, who were they?
Hanna Arendt has written about the "banality of evil" in her analysis of Nazi
violence and the trial of Eichman [21]. She argues that these were very "normal"
human beings who did terrible, unthinkable things as a matter of bureaucratic routine to
large numbers of people. Likewise the large number of ordinary Hutu in Rwanda who formed
the murderous mobs who killed a million Tutsis could not all have been mentally ill. The
law of large numbers would make a mockery of such a definition of "normality" or
mental illness.
In studies of technological risk and engineering failure the term "human error"
commonly appears [22]. Our common humanity, what ever or upbringing, training, material
economic situations, seems to contain the potential for the those occasional "pilot
errors", "clinical mistakes", "lapses of attention." It is also
within our shared humanity to become caught up for shorter or longer periods in "mass
hysteria", "mob violence", and cult like belief and practice.
Whatever the predisposing psychology of the terrorist, the question remains, what social
forces, what historical processes are at work in producing this particular kind of
organized violence at this moment?
It is too simple to say, as Saskia Sassen [23] wrote in comment in the London Guardian,
that such violent acts of terrorism are the non-verbal, final, desperate communication of
the "global south" to the rich north. It is true that the period of the 1980s
and 1990s saw rapid widening of the gap between rich and poor, great instability in many
nation states, whole livelihoods made obsolete, and much wage migration. All this provoked
violence in many parts of the world, and riots in the north as well, such as those in Los
Angeles in 1992 and in Bradford and Leeds in northern England this year.
There is something more that needs to be considered. This spiral, vicious cycle, violence
that has very specific forms, and must be unpicked from the over general discourse of the
"global south."
Osama Bin Laden, like Noriega and all the graduates of the School of the Americas, like
Marcos, like Mobutu, and so many others, is the creature of U.S. cold war policy. His army
was formed in the CIA financed struggle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Just as
the cold war has left thousands of square miles contaminated with nuclear waste from bomb
factories and tests, it has left deep social scars where the "free world" used
depots, criminals, and fanatics to guard its oil, copper, oil palms, and ranch lands from
"communism."
It is also important to remember that the Gulf War shattered Iraq, that more than half a
million children have died in the last eight years of sanctions and continued bombing due
to the inability of cities such as Basra and Baghdad to rebuild water treatment plants, or
for parents to feed children [24]. Of course Sadam Hussein and his associates have
exploited and profiteered and misused food aid, but whole world shares blame that such an
unstable and deadly situation has continued unresolved for so long. The same can be said
of the failure to settle the even longer standing violent conflict between the Israeli
state and the people of Palestine [25].
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's statue sits in Grosvenor Square in London. It is flanked by
twin, symmetrical fountains in sunken courts. On the walls of these courts are carved the
simple words of the "Four Freedoms". These provide a framework for thinking
about the root causes of the catastrophe in New York city.
Freedom from want. What role do the
inhuman conditions of hunger, disease, lack of decent shelter, secure livelihood that so
many people suffer play in the genesis of terrorism?
Freedom from fear. The avowed goal of
Bin Laden is the overthrow of feudal and despotic Arab regimes that have been allies and
friends of the U.S. since the discovery of oil in these lands. Political opposition to
them is repressed. Bin Laden himself was forced to flee his native Saudi Arabia. What,
then, is the relation between peaceful, democratic change in these countries and the
reduction of terrorism? What are the citizens of Western democracies willing to put up
with in order to ease their sense of vulnerability, of fear (real or imagined)? How much
surveillance, erosion of civil rights? How much violation of human rights of asylum
seekers and of civilians in other parts of the world, in the countries that "harbor
terrorists"?
Freedom of speech. How will the events
of 11 September play out in the continuing protests over the impacts of globalization?
Will the brutality of police in Montreal and Genoa be repeated, but this time, in other
WTO and G7 host cities with little or no outcry because "civilization is at war"
with the "uncivilized"? Just because one abhors and mourns the deaths of
innocent people in the World Trade Tower, it does not follow that critique of the manner
in which world trade is conducted shows disrespect for the dead.
Freedom of worship. Islam is not to
blame for these events. Chris Patten, former Governor of Hong Kong, has noted that it is
as logical to blame all Islam for such a suicide attack as to blame all Christianity for
the brutality and inhumanity of the Inquisition.
What is to be done? Lessons to be
drawn from natural hazard research.
First, there are some observations that can be made from the point of view of research on
natural hazards. I will then turn to some more general, concluding remarks.
Harm, violence, and terror. Human
perpetuated, organized violence, especially that which is highly random and indiscriminate
presents a far different challenge to society than natural or even technological hazards.
Fear, coping, and "living
with" hazards. It is likely, on the basis of past history, that human societies can
accommodate the possibility of massive, organized violence of this kind, although the
quality of social relations, especially in ethnically diverse large urban areas may change
as a result.
Adaptations to terror attacks. Such
adaptations are possible, although to be effective something like a police state may be
necessary. Again, the study of social adaptations to the challenges of extreme natural
events shows that people are quite ingenious and that new kinds of technology and social
arrangements can seem "normal" parts of daily life very quickly. The questions,
though is whether people are willing to give up personal freedoms and civil rights to the
degree that might be necessary [26].
The role of technology and science.
Technological developments and dependency has become, ironically, one of the preconditions
for terrorist attacks. The airliners that have become a routine part of the U.S.
transportation system became missiles. Biotechnology, nuclear power, and more society's
dependence on computer technology and communication systems have all made advanced
industrial society vulnerable to attack and provided the means for the attack. Unlike the
application of science, say earth science or engineering, to the problem of earthquake
safety, greater application of science and technology to the issue of terrorist attack is
likely to be only a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for providing security.
These reflections suggest some lines of
action that can be divided into short and long term practical steps as well as some
important ethical considerations.
Short term, Practical Steps
Norman Foster, the architect and urban designer responsible for the Great Court at the
British Museum, the new German Reichstag building, and many other innovative plans and
structures has written this about the attack [27]:
Nothing could have prepared any of us for
the unprecedented scale of the devastation. Its consequences will affect everyone involved
with the creation of buildings and infrastructure. I am certain that the needs of an
open society to live, work, and travel will prevail, but I believe that we owe it to the
victims to ensure that we understand every aspect of this tragedy and that its lessons are
absorbed and acted upon.
In the immediate short term hazard
researchers need to consider what they have to contribute to questions of recovery. How
will individuals, families, firms, the affected neighborhoods, and Manhattan recover? What
precedents are there? What can be learned from the recovery in Mexico City following the
1985 earthquake, or in Kobe, where the total death toll is about the same (although the
areal extent and involvement of infrastructure much greater). Or are wartime precedents
more revealing (Hiroshima, Dresden)?
Other short-term efforts concern a cluster of questions about urbanism and urban design.
How will these events influence the architecture and construction of infrastructure in
cities in the future? This line of discussion would address the challenge of which Norman
Foster writes above. Is it possible to conceptualize a "secure city" in a
holistic way that brings in not only public safety from terrorist attack, but public
health, mitigation and prevention of technological, environmental, and natural hazards as
well as preparedness? Can this be done within the existing context of "healthy
cities" or "sustainable cities"? And, if so, to what extent must justice
and equity questions also accompany such a broad discussion of well being, of a
"culture of prevention"?
Long term, Practical Steps
Taking Norman Foster's appeal to "understand every aspect of this tragedy"
literally and seriously, then geographers (and others) must explore the root causes,
dynamic pressures, leading to unsafe conditions that constituted, at that point in time
(historical, seasonal, diurnal) the vulnerability of people in and around the World Trade
Center.
At a global, macro scale, this must include looking at the causes of such violent misdeeds
in the contemporary patterns of economic and political power in the world, the geography
of grievance and bitterness, and their historical origins. Clare Short, Britain's minister
for overseas development has stated that success in the struggle with poverty and
injustice worldwide is a more effective way of combating terrorism than conventional
warfare, and so has Britain's ambassador to NATO as well as former National Security
Advisor in the Clinton Administration, Anthony Lake.
At the other end of a continuum of scale, there are the life geographies of perhaps thirty
Mexican restaurant workers who found themselves at the top of one of the towers. My
colleague in making the United Nations University videos on citizen based disaster
mitigation in Mexico City and Los Angeles is currently working in New York with Tepeyec, a
support center for Mexican migrants to that city, trying to identify their families and
families of other low income Hispanic workers whose livelihoods have been cut off by the
disaster and to provide then with support. The patterns of vulnerability, impact, and
recovery (or failed recovery) will be made up of many such smaller pieces of a zig saw
puzzle.
Commentators have been saying that "the world will never be the same". Too true.
But perhaps that is a good thing. Perhaps we need to break completely with old models of
warfare, of vengeance, old notions of security and national interest. Perhaps peace with
justice and an acknowledgement of the wounds, schisms, deformities created by the cold war
are preconditions for security [28].
Since the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan refused to admit any historical responsibility
for poverty and debt in developing, formal colonial countries, we have seen two decades of
calls for acknowledgement and even reparations, and corresponding refusals. Reagan (and
Mrs. Thatcher and Chancellor Kohl) was reacting to the call in the 1970s for a New
International Economic Order. File this one under "dead letters" along with the
Law of the Sea treaty and its notion that an international tax on deep ocean bed mining
could finance human development, of basic human needs. These last three words disappeared
from development discourse in the 1980s and 1990s. Most recently there have been the
demands for an apology for the West African slave trade, even for reparations. Rather than
engage with these arguments, the U.S. left Durban, withdrawing from the U.N. conference on
racism.
The U.S. has never come near the U.N. target for industrial countries of providing 0.7% of
GNP as development assistance. At the moment that figure for the U.S. is 0.1% (compare
Denmark's 1.2%). Money will not by peace, but redistributive justice, taking into account
the historical process of accumulation (including the history of the U.S. oil industry set
out in Daniel Yerkin's book, The Prize), must have a role. Money cannot buy friendship and
security, but neither can this kind of threat be met by military response. A combination
of economic and political reforms in the world system are necessary.
These reforms will necessarily require a devolution of corporate power, a more equitable
world trading system, increased equity and respect for difference. They would also require
reductions in the level of energy and material consumption of the more affluent social
strata of the more prosperous nations of the world. With 6% of the world's population, the
U.S. consumes 40% of the energy produced. This is must not a sustainable pattern of
consumption.
Reduction in consumption would have a number of benefits.
First, as new social norms of consumption and technologies based on more efficient use of
energy and material work their way through our social and spatial systems, new forms of
employment and new, more resilient forms of human settlement and transportation are likely
to result. Long before the watershed events of the 11th of September some people were
arguing that comtemporary forms of techno-bio-social organization are too complex to fully
understand, and therefore disasters are inevitable [29].
Second, reduced and redistributed consumption in the world system should reduce the levels
of poverty and desperation that are the primary seedbed of some forms of cult based
organized violence.
Ethical Considerations
One thing that strikes me as I review the kinds of violence described earlier is that they
all involve, or imply, some notion of "collateral damage". This is true of
conventional warfare; it is true of market based economic development; and it is true of
terrorism. Even those whose acts are most abhorrent have, or would, argue, that the deaths
of innocent people, of civilians, of those who happen to be in the wrong place at the
wrong time is regrettable, not necessary in the interest of some greater and longer term
good or goal. On the basis of simple logical consistency (and ethics depends strongly on
logic), those of us whose prosperity and relative security depends on a history of warfare
and the globalization of a growth based market model of development must take care that
the resulting (relatively) benign forms of structural violence are minimized.
In the end the ethical high ground requires that international law and diplomacy is used
wherever possible in place of organized violence (warfare), even in the defense of society
against state or cult based terrorism [30]. It also requires that or economic relations,
domestically and internationally, reflect the Kantian categorical imperative, that we
treat each human being as an end and not as a means to an end.
Notes
1 See, for example, Rajeev Patel,
"Urban Disaster Management: Lessons from Bhopal." In: Jo Beall, ed., A City for
All, pp. 200-213. London: Zed, 1997.
2 INSERT references from Elaine Enarson's draft FEMA project sessions on violence?
3 For the sake of simplicity my focus here is physical, bodily harm alone; I must leave
aside psychological and economic harm, for which such an offender is rightly called to
justice. See, for example, Tim Newell, Forgiving Justice: A Quaker Vision for Criminal
Justice. Swarthmore Lecture 2000. London: Quaker Home Service, 2000.
4 One thinks, of course, of walled cities and cities sited on hill tops and other
defendable positions as well as stockpiles and food reserves built up for redistribution
not only in times of famine but in the case of siege, an arrangement from archaic times
that has been commented upon by economic historians and archeologists. I am not aware,
however, of a comprehensive history of the geographical, urbanistic, architectural, and
social measures to protect cities, neighborhoods, infrastructure, buildings and dwellings
within cities. The very concepts of "protection", "safety", and
"security" have many cross cultural histories that would have to be interwoven
into such a review. The 21st Century brings whole new technologies to bear, for instance
the proliferation of closed circuit television in public places. Such cameras may number
2.5 million in the Britain alone, and in London one is likely to be captured on camera as
many as 300 times a day (Ellen Hale, "Many Britons smile on spread of candid
cameras." USA Today, 1 October, 2001, p. 6A).
5 INSERT reference to Dennis Rodgers's work and gang literature? J. Cock, "Gun
Violence as an Issue of Community Psychology in Contemporary South Africa." In: M.
Sedat, N. Dumar, and S. Lazarus, eds., Community Psychology, pp. 293-308. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
6 An excellent overview from a philosophical point of view is provided by Ronald Aaronson,
Dialectics of Disaster: The Problem of Violence in the 20th Century.
7 Anthropological forms of violence such as "ritual warfare" generally afflict
little injury or death (see J. Hass, ed., The Anthropology of War. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
8 Kenneth Hewitt, Regions of Risk: A Geographical Introduction to Disasters. Harlow,
Essex: Longman, 1997.
9 INSERT references to Johan Galtung, Samir Amin, Maria Mies, Wallerstein, Preiswerk and
others. Again, for the sake of simplicity, I am not considering other important arguments
that also define such social ills as racism and social exclusion as forms of organized
violence.
10 UNDP's Human Development Report 2001 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) provides
the following start capsule summary of poverty (p. 9):
· 968 million people without access to safe water
· 2.4 billion without access to sanitation facilities
· 34 million living with HIV/AIDS
· 2.2 million die each year from indoor air pollution
· 11 million children under five die of preventable causes each year
· 163 million children are below their normal weight for age
· 325 million children out of school during primary and secondary
school years (183 million of them girls)
· 1.2 billion people live on less than one U.S. dollar per day
· 2.8 billion people live on less than two U.S. dollars per day
11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.
12 "Cult based" is perhaps not the appropriate term because non-state terror has
been used by groups as diverse as the IRA, Hamas, Aum Shin Rikyo, the Tamil Tigers, and
Al-Qaeda. On the other hand, there are social psychological characteristics of membership,
bonding, discipline that these kinds of groups have in common, and these do all seem
cult-like, despite the widely different worldviews, ideologies, and political aims of such
groups. Some social psychologists do group such dissimilar groups together as
"cults", for example, David G. Myers, Social Psychology, 6th ed. Boston:
McGraw-Hill, pp. 278-284, in which he treats, among others, the "Heaven's Gate"
death cult and right wing commandos in El Salvador.
13 See Haruki Murakami, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. London:
Harvill, 2000.
14 London's Metropolitan Police force was established in 1829 (Gavin Weightman and Steve
Humphries, The Making of Modern London 1815-1914. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1983, p.
18) in response to real and imagined fears (see Yi Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear).
15 Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin, eds., In the Paths to Domination, Resistance, and
Terror. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
16 Kenneth Mitchel, ed., The Crucible of Hazard: Mega-Cities and Disasters in Transition.
Tokyo, United Nations University, 1999
17 Salman Rushdie, Fury. London: Johnathan Cape, 2001, pp. 6-7.
18 INSERT United Nations University urban social vulnerability study web site url; German
Velasquez et al., "A New Approach to Disaster Mitigation and Planning in
Mega-Cities." In: Takashi Inoguchi et al., eds., Cities and the Environment, pp.
161-184. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1999; IDNDR, Cities at Risk. Geneva:
IDNDR, 1996 and INSERT its e-conference web site url.
19 Mental illness is much more widespread in the world than most think (see: Sarah
Boseley, "WHO says 1 in 4 get mental illness," The Guardian, 5 October, 2001, p.
15.
20 Brian McLaughlin and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, eds., Perspectives on Self-Deception.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988; Tony Malin, Social Psychology, 2nd ed.
London: MacMillan, 1997; Jaan Valsiner and Rene van der Veer, The Social Mind. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
21 Hanna Arendt, Eichman in Jerusalem.
22 Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
23 Saskia Sassen, "A message from the global south." The Guardian, 12 September,
2001, p. 23.
24 "Half million over eight years" according to UNICEF and a similar figure from
World Health Organization (D. Leigh and J. Wilson, "Counting Iraq' Victims." The
Guardian, 10 October 2001, p. 21); also see: Gautam Banarji, "The Impact of Modern
Warfare: The Case of Iraq." In: Jo Beall, ed., A City for All, pp. 196-199. London:
Zed, 1997; Graca Machel, The Impact of War on Children. London: Husrt, 2001, pp. 132-4.
25 Edward Said, "Islam and the West are Inadequate Banners." The Observer, 16
September, 2001, p. 27.
26 Matthew Engel, "Liberty Curtailed in the Land of the Free." The Guardian, 19
September, 2001, p. 7.
27 Statement on wall poster added after 11 September to the exhibition in the Great Court,
British Museum, "Exploring the City" by Deyan Sudjic and Foster and Partners.
28 This statement, and what follows, is an attempt to explain, not to excuse the attacks
of 11 September, as well as many other, smaller scale bombings and other acts of terror in
many parts of the world. There are a surprising number of supposedly literate and
well-informed people still writing, a month after the tragedy, as though they can't fathom
the distinction between explanation and excuse. For example, Salman Rushdie complains
about a "bien-pensant anti-American onslaught" which he considers
"appalling rubbish." He writes to remind us that the terrorists are
"against … free speech" but doesn't seem to allow critics of U.S. policy to
explain (not excuse) the attack in terms of prior U.S. international actions ("Let's
get back to life." The Guardian Saturday Review, 6 October, 2001, p. 1). Oddly
enough, Rushdie himself notes that the U.S. policy requires "[b]etter judgment",
and urges that the U.S. "apply that wisdom, retrospectively, to what was done to the
impoverished, oppressed people of Iraq." This self-styled "newest of New
Yorkers" seems to want it both ways.
29 Such a line of though can be found in organizational sociology and political science
(e.g. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984; Thomas
Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap. London: Vintage, 2001), ecological economics (E.F.
Schumacher, Small is Beautiful; Paul Ekins, Green Economics), neo-Marxist and post-modern
social theorists (Martin O'Connor,ed. Is Capitalism Sustainable?; Ulrich Beck, The Risk
Society).
30 Fred Haliday, "No Man is an Island." The Observer, 16 September 2001, p. 26.
By 9 October the U.S. had already accidently killed four United Nations employees in the
office of an agency employed by the UN's demining activities in Afghanistan, located in
the outskirts of Kabul. Bombing had begun as the Taliban seemed on the point of becoming
more cooperative, but the U.S. refused to negotiate with its representatives.
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