Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism - Softcover

"Superb ... Graham builds on the writings of Mike Davis and Naomi Klein who have attempted to expose the hidden corporate and military structures behind everyday life." Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times "A rigorously researched, pioneering book packed with disturbing and at times astonishing information." Icon "Sharp, lucid and elegant prose ...Graham is consistently insightful and compelling. Cities Under Siege is an indispensable analysis of the dark fantasies that the military imagination is seeking to realise in the coming century." Red Pepper "Roll over Jane Jacobs: here's urban geography as it looks like through the eye of a Predator at 25,000 feet. A fundamental and very scary report from the global red zone." Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums "Cities Under Siege is a detailed and intense forensics of new urban frontiers, laboratories of the extreme where experiments with new urban conditions are currently being undertaken. In this fascinating new work Steven Graham has created a novel concept of the city, looking at war as the limit condition of urbanity and calling for an alternative urban life yet to come." Eyal Weizman, author of Hollow Land "A brilliant critique of the deadly embrace of military violence and contemporary urbanism. Steve Graham writes with immense power and lucidity, layering detail over detail and image over image to expose the shadows that are falling across cities around the world. This is not a dystopian future but the present, and Graham compels us to open our eyes to the dangers military urbanism poses to contemporary democracy." Derek Gregory, Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia and author of The Colonial Present "An enlightening overview of the security state's impact on contemporary cities, from overt authoritarian control in war-torn areas to more subtle forms of behavioral influence in places supposedly at peace. Graham shows how military/police/security forces perceive urban places and urban dwellers as subjects to control, and how their inherently undemocratic tactics threaten freedom all over the world." - Nate Berg, Curbed

In this short, highly readable book, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a condensation of the central ideas of The Modern World-System, his monumental study of capitalism as an integrated, historical entity. In developing an anatomy of capitalism over the past five centuries, Wallerstein provides one of the most coherent and succinct introductions tot he genesis of a global system of exploitation. Particular attention is focused on the emergence and development of a unified world market, and the concomitant international division of labor. Wallerstein argues forcefully, against the grain of much current opinion, that capitalism has brought about an actual, not merely relative, immiseration in the countries of the Third World. The economic and social problems of underdeveloped countries will remain unresolved as long as they remain located within a framework of world capitalism. Historical Capitalism is a welcome and stimulating synthesis of one of the most influential assessments of capitalism as a world-historic mode of production.