1. Urban Boomerangs:
Critical Geopolitics and the ‘Long War’
Stephen Graham
Newcastle University

2. Foucault’s ‘Boomerang Effects’
• “While colonization, with its techniques and its political and
juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to
other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect
on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the
apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole
series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and
the result was that the West could practice something
resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself”
– Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège
de France, 1975-6, London: Allen Lane, 2003, pp. 103

3. 1 (Anti) Urban Imaginaries for the ‘Long War’: (LIC, 4GW, NCW)
Both Heartland’s central cities and ‘feral’ cities on colonial frontier "chaotic,
ruined, and repellent, the exact inverse of the orderly domestic idyll of the
suburbs."Steve Macek, 2006

5. 2. New Security Architectures: Passage-Point Urbanism

6. 3. A “Society of Captives’: The Global War Prison
“Having been deployed for the purpose of colonizing the U.S.’s racialized interior and refined by the prison
industrial complex, the techniques of carcerality and torture are now being systematically redeployed
abroad by the U.S. military and outsourced mercenary regime to colonize its racialized populations
overseas.” Brady Thomas Heiner (2007)

7. 4. Anticipatory Targeting,
Tracking and ‘Information War’
“Parallel introduction of antiimmigration and anti-terrorist
integrated information systems is
likely to become yet another
example of a technology
developed to deal with a typically
Orientalised "Other"—the
"terrorist", the focus of a gaze
obsessed with security, racial
profiling, and alien infiltration—
which is eventually brought within
this side of the colonial equation,
adding to the available
technologies of
social control”
Lorenzo Veracini, (2005)

8. • “The truth of the continual targeting of the world as the fundamental form of knowledge
production is xenophobia, the inability to handle the otherness of the other beyond the orbit that
is the bomber’s own visual path. For the xenophobe, every effort needs to be made to sustain
and secure this orbit – that is, by keeping the place of the other-as-target always filled.”
• Rey Chow

11. Global Homelands

13. Sentient Cities: Calculative Backgrounds and ‘Imperial Infrastructure’

14. 5. Militarised (Auto) Control Societies

15. Capsules for the Urban Borderlands

16. 6. The Simulation-Military-Security Complex

18. “Could gamers become decorated war
heroes by virtue of their eye-and-hand
coordination skills, which would eventually
dominate the triggers of network-centric
remote controlled warfare? Taking this
notion to the extreme, could casual
assemblages of home bodies on couches
strewn across America become the new
command posts for an intercontinental
sprawl of robotic warfare?” Finoki
•
Latest Predator controls use the same
HOTAS [hands on stick and throttle] system
on a video game.

19. 7. Political Violence and Urban Infrastructure

20. 8. Counter-Geographies
“The […] separation of colony from metropolis, the systematic occultation of the colonial labour
on which imperial prosperity is based, results in a situation in which […] the truth of metropolitan
existence is not visible in the metropolis itself” Fredric Jameson,, 2003