Dans le cadre de la préparation de notre prochain Atelier du 6 mai intitulé : " Et si l'obsession sécuritaire changeait insidieusement nos rapports à la ville ?", je voulais vous proposer les quelques lignes ci-dessous issues de "Cities under siege - The new military urbanism" de Stephen Graham, dont je vous avais déjà parlé là, mais qui vient seulement de sortir.
Dans le long extrait ci-dessous, Graham revient sur le travail de Michel Foucault qui avait montré dès le milieu des années 70, comment les stratégies de contrôle et de répression développées par les pays occidentaux dans leurs colonies au XIX et au début du XX° siècle, avaient été peu à peu importées et appliquées dans les pays colonisateurs pour mieux contrôler leur population.
Allant dans le sens des réflexions que nous développons depuis plusieurs années (voir là), il montre comment les politiques de ségrégation urbaine conduites par les Israéliens dans les territoires occupés ou par l'US Army en Irak sont de véritables laboratoires pour l'urbanisme ultra-sécuritaire qui se met peu à peu en place dans un certain nombre de pays (Etats-Unis, Royaume-Unis, France, Afrique du Sud, Inde ... )
"The new military urbanism feeds on experiments with styles of targeting and technology in colonial war-zoness, such as Gaza or Bagdad, or security operations at international sport events or political summits. These operationss act as testing grounds for technology and techniques to be sold on through the world's burgeoning homeland security markets. Through such processes of imitation, explicitly colonial models of pacification, militarization and control, honed on the streets of the global South, are spread to the cities of capitalist heartland in the North. (...)
(...) International studies scholar Lorenzo Veracini has diagnosed a dramatic contemporary resurgence in the importation of typically colonial tropes and techniques into the management and developpment of cities in the metropolitan cores of Europe and North America." (...)
"It is important to stress, then, that the resurgence of explicity colonial stratégies and techniques amongst nation-states such as the US, UK and israel in the contemporary 'post-colonial" period involves not just the deployment of the techniques of the new military urbanism in foreign war zones but their diffusion and imitation through the securization of Western urban life.
As in the ninetheenth century, when European colonial nations imported fingerprinting, panoptic prisons ans Haussmannian boulevard-building through neighbourhood of domestic cities after first experimenting with them on colonized frontiers, colonial techniques today operate through what Michel Foucault termed "boomerang effects". "it should never be forgotten", Foucault wrote,
that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.
(Michel Foucault, Society must Be defended : lectures at the Collège de France)
In the contemporary period, the new military urbanism is marked by - and, indeed, comprises - a myriad of startling Foucauldian boomerang effect.
"For example, Israeli drones designed to vertically subjugate and target Palestinians are now routinely deployed by police forces in North America, Europe and East Asia. Private operators of US "supermax" prisons are heavily involved in running the global archipelago organizing incarceration and torture that has burgeoned since the start of the "war of the terror". Private military corporations heavily colonize reconstruction contracts in both Iraq and New Orleans. Israeli expertise in population control is sought by those planning securityoperations for international events in the West."
"The construction of sectarian enclaves modelled on Israeli practice by US Forces in Baghdad from 2003, for example, was widely described by US security personnel as the deevlopment of US_style gated communities in Iraq. In the aftermath of the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in late 2005, US Army officers talked of the need to "take back" the city from Iraqui-style "insurgents"."
Que dire de plus, sinon qu'il faut probablement se replonger d'urgence dans "Surveiller et punir" pour mieux comprendre l'urbanisme qui se prépare dans de nombreuses parties du monde ?
