Against anthropocentrism: the destruction of the built environment as a distinct form of political violence

This article examines the nature of the destruction of built environments. Such destruction should be seen as a distinct form of violence: urbicide. This violence comprises the destruction of shared spatiality which is the condition of possibility of heterogeneous communities. Urbicide, insofar as it is a destruction of heterogeneity in general, is thus a manifestation of a ‘politics of exclusion’. However, this account of the destruction of the built environment is not only an insight into a distinct form of political violence. Rather, an account of urbicide also offers a metatheoretical argument regarding the scholarly study of political violence: namely that destruction of built environments contests the anthropocentric frame that usually dominates the study of violence. Introduction: urban destruction and ‘anthropocentric bias’ On 9th November 1993 the Bosnian–Croat army (HVO) destroyed the Stari Most, or Old Bridge, in Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina. The bridge had spanned the Neretva river for over 400 years and was regarded as being both integral to the city of Mostar as well as an outstanding example of both Ottoman and Bosnian cultural heritage. Video footage of this event featured in numerous television news bulletins, adding to the stream of horrifying representations of suffering emerging from the bloody disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. The destruction of the Stari Most was striking insofar as it dramatically illustrated the violence perpetrated against Bosnians and their heritage.1 1 Michael Sells’ definition of Bosnians (as opposed to Bosnian–Croat, or Bosnian–Serb) as ‘all residents of the internationally recognized sovereign nation of Bosnia–Herzegovina, regardless of their religious affiliation, who consider themselves Bosnian, that is, who remain loyal to a Bosnian state built on the principles of civic society and religious pluralism’ is the one that I would follow in this argument (Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), pp. xiv). This definition is more adequate in describing those who were the principal victims of such violence than the somewhat mistaken designation of ‘Bosnian Muslim’. Just as the Jews were not the only victims of the Holocaust, so those who could be identified as ‘Muslim’ were not the only victims of the Bosnian Serbs. Indeed, in most discourse ‘Muslim’ is deployed as a ‘catch-all’ category for all those who found themselves to be opposed to, victims of, or excluded from, the Bosnian–Serb or Bosnian–Croat nationalist programmes. See also in this regard Tone Bringa’s comments on the evolution of Bošnjac identity (Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 34–36).