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The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrates once again the vulnerability and significance of cities in war. In this article, and with inspiration from Ian Hacking’s historical ontology, I draw on a varied source material to argue that there is today something new and qualitatively distinct in how the U.S. military approaches war and combat in urban environments. By investigating the historical-conceptual trajectory of “the urban” in U.S. military practice from the mid-eighteenth century until today, the article argues that a gradual shift has occurred in terms of how the armed forces have begun to think of and act on the urban as a distinct object that can be made “known” and managed in and through a specialized knowledge. A “military urban” has come into being, conditioned by a particular epistemic and implying a new way for urban spaces to exist in war. The article’s findings have implications for our understanding of what the urban is for militaries and, relatedly, for grasping the role of epistemics and knowledge practices in conditioning military actions in and on urban spaces.

In this article, I argue that a ‘situated-portable epistemic nexus’ characterizes postwar urban peacebuilding. The concept captures how knowledge in urban peacebuilding is produced by/productive of discursive and material conditions that are both, and simultaneously, situated in a particular urban environment and transnationally emergent and circulating. I illustrate this argument in an analysis of an urban peacebuilding project in postwar Pristina, Kosovo, that relied on the computer game Minecraft as the main technology. Despite a heterogeneous group of actors involved, and a primacy devoted to local perspectives, the at-once-situated and globally portable discourses, technologies and artefacts of the Pristina project conditioned the production of a relatively narrow urban knowledge and space that formed around a purely visual conception of the urban – overall limiting what the situated urban was and could become.

Under de senaste åren har eskalerande urbanisering och väpnade konflikter i städer kommit att uppfattas som en allt viktigare global säkerhetsfråga, både bland forskare och praktiker. Samtidigt är det empiriskt välbelagt att städer alltid har formats av krig och krigföring, och krig och krigföring alltid har formats av städer. Trots detta är samtida krigsvetenskapliga och västerländska militärstrategiska diskussioner om krig, fred och säkerhet i relation till städer och det urbana ofta onyanserade och baserade på ett binärt tänkande. Syftet med den här artikeln är att genom en bred forskningsöversikt belysa och exemplifiera den ömsesidiga relationen mellan krig och städer, och därmed bidra till en fördjupad och mer nyanserad samtida diskussion om krig i och mot städer, samt till en fördjupad förståelse för stadens dubbla konstruktion och funktion som en miljö som både är konstituerad av och konstituerande för militärt våld. Dylik fördjupad förståelse är angelägen även i relation till samtida fredsforskning rörande post-konfliktstäder och urbant fredsbyggande.

In military and academic circles, there is today an acknowledgment that war is urban and, for some commentators, that the urban also is war—in the sense of an ongoing militarization of cities and urban environments. Indeed, that war is (partly) urban has been the case for as long as humans have lived in cities and towns. What is new at present though is the recognized topicality of the manifold links between urban geographies and war. Until the last couple of decades, urban war and urban warfare were considered phenomena either of the past or of the future, but less of the present. It was only in the late 1990s and early 2000s that the significance of urban spaces in and of war became widely acknowledged, partly as an effect of military and everyday wartime experiences from places such as Grozny, Mostar, and Sarajevo. Other coinciding developments involve the post–Cold War revival of geopolitics, as well as emergent scholarly linkages between (critical) urban geopolitics, on the one hand, and studies of the military, war, and peace, on the other hand. However, this is not to say that military organizations themselves have not historically been preoccupied with urban spaces. With a focus on both intrastate and interstate urban conflict and urban war, the contribution at hand offers an understanding both of the academic study of military urban geographies and of military geographical approaches to and imaginaries of urban warfare and urban space (without going into military urban warfare practices as such). This is done over five sections, each with a specific theme that also illustrates the many links between academia and the military when it comes to cities and urban environments. The first section frames the topic. It offers a broad introductory perspective in the sense of an overview of academic literatures that are often combined in the scholarly study of military urban geographies. First are the conventional and the critical approaches, respectively, to military geography, and second is the literature on urban war that to a varying degree targets geographical aspects. The second section addresses in more depth conventional military geographical approaches to urban spaces, in a way that includes both academic works and military treaties and doctrines. The third section develops further conventional military geographical approaches to and imaginaries of urban space. It details some of the more recent military operational and strategic modes of imagining and approaching urban geographies. The fourth section shifts the focus back to the scholarly study of military urban geographies, but from critical perspectives. As further developed here, critical scholarship on the topic shifts attention to the conditions and effects of military presence on cities and urban spaces and to how military operations are both constituted by and constitutive of urban spaces and sites. The fifth and final section introduces a specific subtheme in critical scholarship on urban spaces in and of war: the literature on urbicide.

This article explores the question of human agency in military targeting. Targeting is one of the key drivers of war. When studied by academic disciplines, much interest has been devoted to the ethics and effects of military targeting. Less debated, but focused here, is the question of the conditions of human agency within military targeting. In the literature that does exist on this topic, there is a questioning of the traditional conception of human agency but at the same time a lack of closer conceptualisation of different kinds of articulations of human agency in the targeting process. In this article, we propose a recentring of human agency in critical scholarship on military targeting. With inspiration from Theodore Schatzki's work on ‘practice’, by analytically approaching targeting as a practice, and through various examples from Operation Iraqi Freedom, the article develops and illustrates a framework for the conceptualisation of human agencies in targeting. This framework distinguishes articulations of agency based on whether they furthered the (temporary) ordering of the targeting practice or challenged its internal organising elements. The study of military targeting is significant not least since the phenomenon is one of the key ‘engines’ and drivers of war's constant becoming.

This article analyses the recent military ‘turn to reflexivity’ in relation to current reflexive commitments in critical studies of the military. With reflexivity, military organizations have begun to inquire into its own role as a producer and user of knowledge, and into the constitutive effects of knowledge in and on the world. A reflexive concern with the conditions and effects of knowledge has thus made militaries sensitive to the epistemic dimensions of military force. The broader socio-political implications of the military’s attention to epistemics, in terms of how knowledge may constitute and bring into being novel socio-political orderings, make it an urgent task to explore this development in relation to the reflexive state of critical research on the military. The first argument that I make in the article is that existing reflexive commitments in critical military studies are conceptually able to target scholarly-military epistemic interactions and the constitutive effects thereof, but less able to address epistemic distinctions in terms of how knowledge is produced and how different conditions shape the content of knowledge. This, however, is what is needed to critically address the military reflexive development. Based on this, I argue secondly that a fruitful broadening and enriching of the reflexive gaze may be achieved by further taking reflexivity in a Bourdieusian direction – a move that ultimately works complementary to existing reflexive commitments in critical military studies.

Urban wars represent one – perhaps the – phenomenon in which war and cities take particular form in and through each other. With the epistemics of this reciprocal relationship being less studied, this article brings together the discourses on urban war and military interoperability respectively. Both discourses emphasise the question of knowledge. A shared geographic knowledge held by the service branches involved in a joint operation is considered key for interoperability to arise. In the urban wars discourse, the need and difficulty of ‘knowing’ the urban are stressed. However, we know less about whether military services involved in a joint urban operation produce distinct geographic knowledges and, if so, with what effects. With inspiration from critical scholarship on military geographies and from works on the history and geography of knowledge, this article develops a conceptual framework to target the mutually constitutive relationship between military epistemics and urban space in urban war. In it, I make a twofold argument, illustrated with the help of empirical examples from two Israeli joint urban military operations. First, the type of geographic knowledge that military ground and air forces produce as they seek to ‘make known’ particular urban spaces differs due to the services' distinct situatedness and relative distance to the urban environment. The produced types of military geographic knowledge, moreover, do not imply different perspectives on the urban as a pre-existing entity as much as they bring – in distinct fashions – the urban into being.

Peacebuilding debates increasingly revolve around questions about knowledge and expertise. Of particular interest is what (and whose) knowledge(s) ends up authoritative in interventions. This article addresses a problem in the literature on the epistemics and epistemic authority of peacebuilding interventions: the acknowledgement of but lacking attention to plural knowledges, the transgressive character of expertise, and knowledge struggles. It does this by discussing recent suggestions that peacebuilding epistemic authority can be fruitfully analysed as a Bourdieusian field. The article identifies a tension in Bourdieu’s own thinking about fields, which has shaped some of these recent proposals. This tension, nevertheless, also enables a reconsideration of fields and struggles, and thereby an analysis that takes plurality and transgressiveness into account. By developing such an alternative conceptual position, the article sees peacebuilding epistemic authority as object- and struggle-bound; conditioned and dependent on dynamics that go beyond peacebuilding as a distinct field of practice. This position is illustrated in an analysis of the emergence and (temporary) establishment of epistemic authority in peacebuilding interventions on informal economies.