In an interview on Divided Cities

Jon, we’re going to talk about divided cities – a subject you know quite a bit about having written a book by that title yourself. A book which took you several years to research and in which you look at five cities – Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar and Nicosia - where physical barriers have been implemented to keep hostile ethnic communities apart. Could you describe briefly what you were attempting to do in that book?

Ever since World War Two, any observer can see that the nature of warfare in general has changed very quickly from conflict between nations over territory in a ‘winner takes all’ fashion to intra-state conflict and civil war. Conflict of a kind where you have different ethnic groups, different identities, duking it out perhaps over territory but perhaps not; for political control or just to wipe one another out. So what you have is a shift from the piled up corpses being guys in uniforms to something else. If you look at the statistics now for those who have died in war since 1945 you see that a growing majority, a shocking majority of those corpses are civilian non-combatants.

We looked into divided cities not because we had a morbid fascination with these traumatised cities, but because they seemed to be a keyhole through which you could glimpse this larger phenomenon relatively clearly. Of course there’s a whole parallel conversation about cities as their own subject, about urban development and urban decay – which is why I’ve also put Lewis Mumford’s classic book on my list. But I’m talking about actual residents of divided cities. Talking about them as the victims and actors of a broader conflict.

In the bibliography you prepared for me you’ve chosen books which illuminate your subject from several points of view and you’ve characterized them as different voices, starting with Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. You call this ‘the expansive voice of the scholar of systems’.

I’d say of all the books the list I gave you, if one of your readers were thinking about just picking up one, this would be it. Anderson created a whole new genre of historiography with this book. He’s just a wonderful guy, still teaching at NYU I guess, who decided in the early eighties to go back and do the archaeology on where nations come from. He didn’t just accept France as France or Britain as Britain. He went back and put dates and names on the origins of these things which we call nations. He talks about how capricious the beginnings often where, how unlikely, and gets under the skin of the whole concept known as nationalism. Now the reason why this book is on my list is that one can’t talk intelligently about the nature of war or civil war unless one grasps how powerful the influence of the nation really is. Everybody thinks love of country is great. It’s great to be patriotic. And to die for your country is of course traditionally considered to be noble. But for your ethnic group or your tribe or, god forbid, for your family – that’s considered to be pretty low brow, a low level affiliation. But here’s Benedict Anderson with his brilliant book and he’s saying essentially that the nation, for which it is noble to die, is a fantasy founded in accident. I called him the ‘expansive voice of the scholar of systems’ because he’s looking at the underlying trestle upon which Britain and France, for example, rest upon.