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Chapter  Warning Beacons I would describe the Northern Ireland problem as probably not much different than anywhere else. The more and more I try to understand con- flict, the more and more I find resonances in other places and with other people . . . So can we have a single facet that is stark and in front of us that says: ‘Let’s deal with the problem’? Well, of course we do. It’s fear. Emotion. The intimacy of fear. So we try to remove the fear by creating the self-imposed apartheid that people demand. But none of it deals with the historical, the cultural, the economic, the social, none of it deals with any of those, so unless we have a multi-faceted approach to what our problem is, I don’t think we can remotely begin to deal with our problem. (David Ervine, former Member of the Legislative Assembly, Belfast, ) This book compares five internally partitioned cities: Belfast, where ‘‘peacelines’’ have separated working-class Catholic and Protestant residents since ‘‘the Troubles’’ began in 1968; Beirut, where seventeen years of civil war and a volatile ‘‘Ligne de demarcation’’ made the city into a sectarian labyrinth; Jerusalem, where Israeli and Jordanian militias patroled the Green Line for nineteen years; Mostar, where Croatian and Bosniak communities split the city along an Austro-Hungarian boulevard into autonomous halves beginning in 1992, and Nicosia, where two walls and a wide buffer zone have segregated Turkish and Greek Cypriots since 1974. In each city, urban managers under-estimated growing interethnic tensions until it was so late that violence spread and resulted in physical segregation. Though the walls, fences, and no man’s lands that resulted were generally designed to be temporary, they have considerable staying power, forcing divided residents to grapple with life ‘‘under siege.’’ Unlike regular soldiers, destined to leave the battlefield in one condition or another , the inhabitants of wartorn cities confront their terrors at home without the means of retreat or escape. Even after politicians have secured a peace, the citizens struggle with losses and missed opportunities that are beyond compensation. Along the path to urban partition, a social contract  Chapter  between municipal government and residents is broken. The costs of renegotiation tend to be high. Five Warning Beacons Partitioned cities act as a warning beacon for all cities where intercommunal rivalry threatens normal urban functioning and security. Every city contains ethnic fault-lines or boundaries that give shape to ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ neighborhoods and lend local meaning to ‘‘the other side of the tracks.’’ Since all cities reflect local demographics in spatial terms, each can be located somewhere on a continuum between perfect spatial integration and complete separation. Evidence gleaned from the five cities examined here suggests that, given similar circumstances and pressures, any city could undergo a comparable metamorphosis. Accordingly, this comparative study offers guidance to urban managers who seek to avoid the enormous costs of physical segregation . Extreme case studies are useful because they reflect accelerated cause and effect dynamics that might otherwise require decades to observe (Benvenisti 1982: 5). Divided cities expose what lies in store for a large, and perhaps growing, class of cities on a trajectory toward polarization and partition between rival communities. In the early twenty-first century, this class includes Montreal, Monrovia, Dagestan, Washington, D.C., Baghdad, Dili, Bunia, Novi Sad, Kigali, Singapore, Cincinnati, Kirkuk, and Oakland. Divided cities are generally linked with civil wars in which group identity is threatened. This type of war dominated the late twentieth century, leaving many cities vulnerable. Indeed, since World War II there has been a marked shift in global warfare trends from inter- to intrastate conflict: of 64 wars between 1945 and 1988, 59 were intrastate or ‘‘civil’’ wars, and about 80 percent of those who perished were killed by someone of their own nationality . During this same period, 127 new sovereign states were created and 35 new international land boundaries have been drawn since 1980 (Strand, Wilhelmsen, and Gleditsch 2003). This splintering trend peaked around 1990 with the height of what has been called the ‘‘Third World War’’—the systematic and violent disintegration of weak states into statelets controlled by regional ethnic rivals (Marshall 1999). As of 2007, about 23 protracted non-state, civil conflicts were ongoing, down from about 38 in 2003 and more than 90 in 1990. Of these, approximately 80 percent were grounded in contested group rights or [3.21.104.109] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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