Samenvatting

It is now well established that both the ‘war on terror’ and its descendents have been heavily constituted through highly urban discourses, materialities and practices. This article - deliberately transdisciplinary, synthetical and polemical in scope - seeks to demonstrate that new ideologies of permanent and boundless war are radically intensifying the militarization of urban life in the contemporary period. By engaging with Michel Foucault's concept of the ‘boomerang effect’, this paper delineates the ways in which contemporary processes of militarisation - which surround what I label the ‘new military urbanism’ - raise fundamental questions for critical urban and political scholarship because of the ways in which they work to normalise the permanent targeting of everyday urban sites, circulations, and populations. Focusing primarily on US military security and military doctrine, culture and technology, this paper explores four of the new military urbanism's inter-related foundations in detail. These are: the deep Foucauldian boomerangs linking experimentation with new architectures and technologies of control in war-zone and domestic cities; the emerging urban political economies of the ‘security’ industries; the ways in which practices and discourses of political violence and securitisation permeate the everyday infrastructures of cities; and the cultural performances of militarised media consumption. The paper concludes by identifying emerging counter-political and countergeographic activism as it seeks to challenge the normalization of the new military urbanism.