Leave No MRAP Behind: A Critical Materialist Account of Urban Imaginaries in Post-9/11 U.S. and Middle East

The 21^st century’s surge in violence against urban areas is a signature of an increasing securitization of all domains of life through growing technophiliac (after Graham 2008) military strategies and expulsions (after Sassen 2014) of capitalist political economies. This situation is specific to the U.S. and Western countries’ new colonial politics against urbanities and ecologies of the Global South, and against ‘second-class citizens’ and marginalized/dehumanized groups within those Western countries.
The recent circulation of the U.S. military’s MRAP vehicles from the warzones in Afghanistan and Iraq into the U.S. domestic territory and its law enforcement institutions is one outcome and feature of violence against urban areas. The MRAPs were designed to secure U.S. soldiers’ bodies (as U.S. citizens) and expertise (as U.S. R&D investment) against dehumanized bodies and lives of soldiers and citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq. But eventually, the MRAPs return ‘home’ and get reassigned to law enforcement only to perpetuate structural discrimination and violence against lines of class, race, gender, and nationality in the U.S. On 1 May 2015, one MRAP Caiman vehicle that once traversed the urban areas of Afghanistan or Iraq showed up in Sheriff outfit in Baltimore, MD to pacify and control Black Americans protesting against police brutality and the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MI on 9 August 2014.

This thesis documents and investigates post-9/11 militarization processes in the U.S. and how technomilitary strategies learn about/from urbanization in the Global South only to ‘administer’ the lives, bodies, and resources of its inhabitants and eventually the lives, bodies, and resources of U.S. ‘second-class citizens’ under rubrics of ‘homeland security’. The central focus of the thesis is the MRAP program (2006-2012) that embodied the values of military technoscience, eminent post-9/11homeland security, Cold War legacies, and the colonial power of the U.S. political and corporate economies. From waged warfare that creates the need for MRAPs, to the rapid acquisition process that designs and procures them, to the techno-material failure of the vehicles in the warzone, and all the way to the military-industry-commercial-corporate relations that produce the political economic circulation, the MRAPs become embodiments of imaginaries of security, heirs of systemic and structural violence, and militarized commodities with social lives that shapes urbanization in the warzone and at home.

The research approaches military strategy and material technoscience as a series of attempts and failures that unfold in a multiplicity of situations, and it employs diverse methodologies from thick description, to genealogy, media content analysis, and mapping. The thesis is structured in four interdependent chapters, a framing introduction, and a reflective conclusion that presents critical analysis and propositions about the ongoing dynamic relations between militarization and urbanization.

The following five themes are discussed across the thesis and addressed in the conclusion: 1) Engaging with the Technomilitary Field: an analysis necessary to deconstruct how contemporary technoscience works hand-in-hand with power (state, corporate, and non-state actors) to shape the spatial and political urban realms in Western and non-Western geographies; 2) Reading Warfare beyond Haussmannization: upon the “urban turn” in RMA (Graham 2008) and the blurring of boundaries in urban warfare (Weizman 2012), an analysis of urban environments becoming the complex socio-spatial medium subject to the hegemony of militarized hi-tech network-centric triangulation and beyond the conventional lens of Haussmannization; 3) Recognizing the Non-Binary Relation of Securitization and Militarization: an analysis of securitization as the issue and militarization as a (major) subset of the issue that opens up an introspection into the future of urbanities as elastic spatio-territorial and juridico-legal spaces of heavily-securitized sociality where strategies of Homeland Security and Defense merge into each other; 4) On Relations of Violence and Urbanization: an analysis of how to engage with understanding structural violence beyond state monopoly and with increasing blurring of military-civilian technosocial relations to stand up against violence in an age of urban warfare and ‘everywhere war’; and, 5) On Urban Citizenship and the ‘Urban’ as Refuge: on how urban citizenship is a necessary condition for the urban.