Soldiers in Baltimore: The Wire and the New Global Wars

In September 1992, an article appeared in the Baltimore Sun comparing the Murphy Homes project complex in inner city Baltimore to civil war zones around the world: "The image is riveting and clear: police officers with guns cocked walking through the streets shouting angrily at an unruly crowd. It could be Bosnia, Soweto, or Belfast, where civil wars have shredded the fabric of civilization" (Simmons 1992). The Murphy Homes were ultimately demolished in 1999, but the war-like violence that plagued them over the course of the 1990s resurfaces in fictional form in The Wire, HBO's (Home Box Office) series about Baltimore.¹ While drawing on local history, The Wire also extends and deepens the above analogy from the Sun, linking Baltimore to war zones in other parts of the world. As if to elaborate on the account in the Sun article, The Wire reminds us that a clear understanding of Baltimore requires coming to terms with the conditions of state failure that bind the city to metropolitan areas like Baghdad and Mogadishu. The statelessness of the city cuts two ways in The Wire, applying to both the loss of sovereign authority in the projects and to the loss of legal rights and protections for residents. When local law enforcement officials attempt to reclaim the projects by force, they reinscribe the cycle of stateless violence and militarized intervention, raising the specter that war has become a looming, unending reality in urban America.

The Wire invites us to view the organized urban violence within Baltimore as a variety of the new low-intensity wars that have been spreading around the globe since the end of the Cold War, turning cities into a primary space of military operation.² More significantly, perhaps, in the process of defining the American city as a war zone, The Wire raises the agonizing question of how to end the violence associated with these interminable new wars. At the heart of the show is a crucial predicament related to sovereign power: If, as the series suggests, the sovereign state often creates conditions for warfare and participates in its escalation, the state often plays a necessary role in curtailing the violence, as well. Civilians who are victimized by new wars still depend on state intervention for protection, even, paradoxically, when the military force of the state fuels these wars in the first place.

The Wire grapples with this predicament, sustaining an inquiry into the potential of a militarized state to be substantively reformed. Reform of the state does not hinge tenuously on the benevolence of officials or on their commitment to democratic values. Instead, the motivation for reform derives from the toll that endless war takes on the state's own flagging authority and reputation. At issue is whether state security forces are capable of listening to the child soldiers who populate the inner city and of simultaneously limiting the influence of the drug organization that hires these soldiers and dominates the projects. Created during a period of national decline that some have likened to an interregnum, The Wire offers us a failing state, whose very existence is threatened by its tendency to suppress the voices of witnesses to war.³ The sovereign state's waning prestige creates a compelling narrative question around whether it will heed the voices of these witnesses, giving them a say in repairing a war-torn environment. Confronted, much like the audience of the show, by a vast array of urban sound—whether transmitted by wiretap, cell phone, high fidelity speakers, or human informants—state officials can only reclaim their relevance as political authorities through a heightened attention to the musings and grievances that emanate from the projects.

New Wars in Baltimore

Political scientists, urban geographers, and sociologists who study new wars generally agree that the period of history in which highly centralized state armies fought against each other on battlefields until one side surrendered to the other is over. In the post-Cold War era, state armies find themselves engaged in a type of asymmetrical warfare that renders obsolete their huge stockpiles...