Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

Images of police and National Guard occupations of Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland revealed tank-like vehicles surrounding protestors. These armored personnel carriers (APCs), many of which were military surplus vehicles transferred to police agencies, are an integral part of the spatial politics of militarized urban policing. This paper examines APCs as material and political technologies that are expanding racialized police violence and regulating democratic assembly. The paper considers the multiscalar process by which these weapons, designed to control urban space, move through transnational circuits—between colony and metropole, from occupied warzone to hyper-policed homefront, from global South to de-industrialized global North. The paper expands the study of what Deborah Avant has called a “market for force” to include the material weapons and technologies deployed in armed conflict. It asks how new lines of power enabled by these weapons emerge, in part, from the global arms marketplace and its intersection with urban life. By placing Avant in conversation with critical theorists of weaponry, including Chamayou and Latour, the paper asks how particular weapons redefine the politics of spatial control, how the rigid lines of fortified urban space are organized into mobile vectors, and where ongoing processes of colonization enter these spatial processes.