Military Urbanization
The Harvard Project on the City (2000), which for the last five years has been engaged in a comprehensive study on urban development in Lagos, describes a military culture as thoroughly constitutive of life in that city. Urban life, military putsches, and counter-putsches are considered closely linked. Maps of the city show huge gaps, since strategically important areas are not allowed to be depicted: criminality and political resistance are both fought using military strategies, the public space is subject to military surveillance. Checkpoints and barriers dominate many key traffic arteries-and often serve underpaid military units as an opportunity to improve their income by extorting tolls. Former officers occupy management positions in institutions privatized by the state as well as the booming private security industry. On the "civil" side of urban society, in turn, the middle and upper classes ensconce themselves from the surrounding city in gated communities reminiscent of military forts. Even fashion, pop, and everyday language is marked by military culture.

This military saturation of Lagos results not only from many years of military dictatorship. The European oil concern Shell also bears some responsibility for this. "Shell urbanism" (ibid., p. 607) entails the compounding of urban space into sealed off, highly monitored industrial enclaves of extraction, production, distribution, and living, along with the inseparable interlinkage between the military, militias, and plant security forces. In so doing, the lines separating state and private repression dissolve: It is now clear that in the 1990s Shell paid off security forces to terrorize the population in alliance with the military (Misser 2002).

Considering the parallels that the Harvard Project sees between the "normative militarization" of everyday urban life and the new NATO or US military doctrines for Military Operations other than War (MOOTW), the question is raised whether Lagos as the thoroughly militarized city represents an urban avant-garde or dystopia? The US military doctrines MOOTW, MOUT (Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain) or FIBUA (Fighting in built-up-areas) already assumed before 9/11 that future conflicts will be primarily low intensity wars in the midst of complex megalopolises on the global peripheries to combat uprisings and terrorism (see Katja Diefenbach and Jochen Becker in this volume). For these situations, where the lines separating police and military operations, civilian and military logics blur, new kinds of military units and weapons are required. For the goal of such operations is to control the urban terrain using so-called "less lethal weapons" without carrying out violence all too openly (so that it is visible in the media). Heavy weaponry and centralized structures of transport and communication are a disadvantage in this context.

"It cannot be assumed that the enemy is not there", FIBUA sum up in a paranoid view of the city that assumes the presence of the enemy in a scarcely controllable urban jungle (see Harvard Project 2000, p. 36). In its spatially complex structure, also dominated by the military, Lagos thus seems to be a model not just for military strategies against new scenarios of threat but also for the repercussions of these doctrines for a city landscape. For Lagos, according to the Harvard Project, is much better prepared for such scenarios than Western metropolises, because central infrastructures, easily destroyed, do not exist at all, and the decentrally organized mechanisms of distribution and production (60% of the employed work as usually small tradesmen) and the numerous grey and black market economies exhibit key aspects of an economy that also functions in wartime.

Kabul or Sarajevo present opportunities that give a sense of how governance operates in (post) war situations where US, NATO, or UN troops are involved: As those in power hardly make a secret of, both are neo-colonial protectorates that are divided into global and local structures. Politically speaking they are dominated by a hardly transparent form of governance that integrates military, international institutions, and transnational NGOs, whose decisions are made with no input at all from local institutions. Economically speaking they decay into a formal sector that makes use of these globalized structures, and a realm consisting of grey and black markets that a large part of the local population needs to use to meet its needs (see Markus Bickel in this book). The post-war situation thus reflects a state of war in one central aspect. If we follow the argument of the conflict researcher Mary Kaldor (1999 pp. 90 ff.), in Sarajevo there already existed during the war a non-territorial dividing line between the "global" and the "local." The global included not only the universalistic Western community of the UN, humanitarian organizations, journalists, and cooperating residents, but also diasporic nationalists and international gangsters. If during the war they were able to move relatively freely, according to Kaldor, the locals suffered under extreme limitations, coerced recruiting, and militias that pulled through the streets. In such protectorates, war can hardly be distinguished from peacetime, "just as it is difficult to distinguish between the political and the economic, public and private, military and civil…The new war economy could be represented as a continuum, starting with the combination of criminality and racism that is to be found in the inner cities of Europe and North America…" (ibid., p. 110).

- Neopatrimonial Order
The West's view of the "tricont" city has been characterized by the notion of chaos ever since they were brought under colonial domination. If this perspective initially stigmatized the social, construction, and spatial forms of organization of the colonized, it today is focused more on the supposed failure of government bodies, exploding violence, or ethnic conflicts, and thus the ungovernability of de-colonized megacities. Here, orders of violence in African or Asian cities that are perceived as exotic stand at the foreground.

Filip De Boeck (2002, p.1) describes the various layers of the sub-Saharan African city as overlapping "palimpsests of colonization, de-, re- and neo-colonization" using the example of Kinshasa. The economic and political crisis that let urban Africa since the 1960s slide from a state of dependence to one of marginality (see Stren/ Halfani 2001) was the result of both colonial history and the process of decolonization. While today in most megacities increasing numbers are forced to supply themselves through the grey and black markets, the formal economy disintegrates. City services are characterized by overcrowded schools, collapsing transportation systems, or hospitals that run out of medicine. Material infrastructure and public buildings increasingly fall into a state of total decay, while the elites plunder public moneys on the backs of the population. At the same time, the public monopoly on violence disintegrates into multiple, often competing orders: In the West, reports on recurrent excesses of violence and occult practices continue to reproduce the image of an irrationality that dominates the "heart of darkness" (Joseph Conrad).

This image of an irrational urban Africa that is falling back from colonial modernism into precolonial barbarism results from a normative transfer of Western concepts like development, civil society, state, or corruption to the African situation. But these urban societies are following their own path to modernization, one that re-Africanizes Western imports and interlinks seemingly contrary modern and traditional rationalities. Here, spheres separate in the West, like state and society, politics and religion, public and private, flow into one another. The dominant form of rule is a neopatrimonial type of state, where personalized and clientelistic power relationships come together in the principle of the big man or strongman (see Schlichte 1996). This form of rule is characterized by political informality as well as the reference to the local and the community of one's own clan. The big man uses his access to public resources to get rich. But this is considered legitimate, for he can then fulfil the expectations of the clientele dependent on him, providing them with jobs or financial assistance. His retaining power promotes his own enrichment, but this in turn requires a system of "disorder", government institutions that are weak and difficult to control. Political agents thus have no interest in a state form structured according to the Western model of orderly government, but instrumentalize disorder to secure their own rule (Chabal/ Daloz 1999). If in an economic or fiscal crisis, like that triggered by internationally forced structural adaptation measures, the resources needed by the strongman to supply his social networks disappear, this results in a tendency towards maximizing disorder to the point of a violent predatory economy. Here, the globalized illegal trade in drugs, arms, toxic waste, or money laundering provides the powerful with an opportunity to compensate for the loss of support from the two blocs after the end of the Cold War and to build up new clienteles.

Western policy helped to create this model of rule, and still promotes it today: The poorly legitimized colonial states, characterized by informal structures, already contradicted the Western form of sovereignty. Today, creditors, the World Bank, and the IMF demand that state tasks should be privatized, in so doing helping the strongmen to destroy bureaucracies or replace the state police apparatus with foreign mercenary companies, thus demolishing the rest of the administrative state. While the "catechism of good governance" demands decreasing public pay rolls, "the consequences are more reminiscent of the earlier colonial catechism of mise en valeur: foreign power rules in order to discipline citizens and make a profit" (Reno 1997, p. 27). For Chabal and Daloz (1999, p. 24ff), the West's new political strategy of promoting a "civil society" represented by NGOs in place of the state is pure ideology: It simply transfers the European model of a civil society independent of state and economy to Africa, overlooking the fact that strongmen simply found or use NGOs to acquire international funds.

All the same, state institutions like the police or courts possess no kind of legitimacy from the point of view of the urban population. On the one hand, they are the inheritors of the colonial period, and have usually continued their despotic practices. On the other hand, they themselves are organized on a market basis, are thus bribable and often implicated in extralegal economies like extortion, buying off prisoners, or highway theft (see Schlichte in this volume). Codified law and legitimacy are so distant from one another that from the perspective of the poor justice can only be achieved by way of informal self-organization. The armed militias represent one form of this: not only do they pursue criminals, but also "convict" them and punish them. The Bakassi Boys in Nigerian cities, founded by small businessmen to protect themselves from crime, already differ from the police and the courts functioning according to a Western model, which are both seen as malicious forces blocking legal judgments, in their reputation for unbribability. To increase their power, the militias take recourse to spiritual practices relying on old traditions of truth-finding and occult rituals they use to claim their invulnerability. The ritualized gruesomeness with which they celebrate executions, playing football with the severed heads of the dead, serves to demonstrate their power even over the spirits of the dead (Harnischfeger 2001). The recourse to the rituals of the ancestors thus serves primarily not the maintenance of tradition; instead, the oft noted re-traditionalization of urban societies is an instrument of social regulation: For example, the fear of the elites' of occult practices or punishments insures that they remain committed to their communities in a material sense, in times of crisis as well.

Since as a rule the militias are ethnically structured, and state security forces withdraw from local conflicts, or themselves divide along ethnic lines, in Lagos diverse local militias and private armies, in alliance with small-time criminals, area boys, increasingly dominate the urban order of violence. The city decays into homogenized streets and districts that are mutually antagonistic (see Harnischfeger in this book). Personal safety is linked to one's "own" group, to which all are forced to subject themselves. Contrary to the frequent assumption that such forms of ethnicization are a component of African culture, Africanist Mahmood Mandani recently pointed out once again that the structure of political or ethnic minorities in today's Africa resulted less from cultural developments than from the indirect form of colonial rule that replaced the rule of law with constructed "customary law" for allied elites. The colonial "goal ... was to separate the various strands of native tradition, divorcing authoritarian strands from the emancipatory, and then to restore the tradition as solely authoritarian and ethnic, and use it for the colonial project" (Mandani 2002, p.29). While this "customary law" defined colonial practice in Africa along ethnic lines, the same was given a religious foundation in India. "Is it then an accident that in post-colonial Africa at issue is primarily who belongs to which ethnic group and who doesn't, and in postcolonial India who's a convert and who isn't?" (Ibid. p.45)

- Violent Communitarianism
As in the African megacities, the local order of violence in India's Mumbai is structured along the fissure between legality and legitimacy. The Hindu-Nationalist movement Shivsena, which renamed the British-founded city Bombay in 1995 as they came to power after the Hindu goddess Mumbai, the protectress of a just and legitimate order, conceives of itself in this way. It attempts to establish this order against "enemies" and state organs which it deems corrupt, inefficient and constituting a power that serves the upper classes. Organized in local associations, the Shivsena in Mumbai is equally a social movement and a criminal gang, an NGO and a government party, a paragovernmental police force and court system. As a communitarian organization that offers social services, organizes cultural activities, or serves as an employment agency, it plays a central role in the social integration of many poor neighbourhoods, where the state does appear as an ordering authority, but takes on no social responsibility (see Julia Eckert in this volume). At the same time, violence forms the core of Shivsena politics, which bears the primary responsibility for the anti-Muslim pogroms in the early 1990s (Eckert 1998).

Violence takes on various functions: Public violence against political enemies serves to scare them, and demonstrate power. Populist actions - hijacking a lorry and distributing the oil to the residents in the face of rising oil prices, for example - are to show the quick success of a policy close to the ground. Concealed violence helps to make money, for example when companies pay off strike-breakers. Ideologically speaking, violence serves as a means of empowerment, the self-empowering of the disadvantaged against a state apparatus where the political parties are also closely linked to underworld businessmen. The power of the slumlords who without any formal rights lease land and flats is based not on armed gangs, but their connections to authorities and politicians, to whom the slumlords then guarantee the votes of their "tenants" in return.

Violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims are often embedded in land conflicts provoked by slumlords, the construction industry, or the neighbouring upper and middle classes. During the December riots in 1992, a very mixed alliance attempted to violently destroy the primarily Moslem slum Behrampada, which lies between a posh residential district and a centre of the global computer industry: While Shivsena politicians held diatribes against the purportedly dangerous Muslims, Shivsena thugs supported by sympathising police units attacked the slum from neighbouring middle-class houses with fire bombs (Dutta 1993). While earlier riots were locally isolated, these "first post-modern riots" (Masselos 1995) rocked the entire city. For the boom of modern office complexes and luxury enclaves that began in the 1980s with the embedding of Bombay in the global economy shattered the traditional pattern of spatial organization, which was marked by clear borders, into a fragmented urban landscape, and produced tensions among all sorts of social and ethnic groups that now found themselves in direct contact with one another. As a result of the militant communalism that culminates in such disturbances, the segregation of the city along religious lines continues. The violence is thus embedded in a "divided labour of governance" between state and non-state authorities. It structures social belonging and assigns rights of participation. In this way, Shivsena's communitarian model of politics monopolizes all legal, economic, and political opportunities (Eckert 1999).

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