Introduction: The problem of violence: Megacities and violence special section

Abstract

The scale and diversity of megacities finds analogous scale and diversity in the violence witnessed and experienced in these complexly dense urban sites. From full-scale military invasion to internecine ethnic and tribal conflict, from paramilitary incursions to strategic car bombs, from slum clearance to pervasive everyday low-level violence, from Mafia-led armies to incessant inflictions of violence on the urban poor, and from missile launches to machete attacks, megacities, most unfortunately, have them all. This article contextualizes many of the key concerns and issues addressed by the four main articles in the section; it does so by arguing for some specific historical, genealogical and technological explanations for the range and scale of violence inflicted upon and within megacity sites. The section proleptically discusses megacity phenomena that will be taken up in greater detail in the forthcoming second volume of the New Encyclopaedia Project Megacities: Problematizing the Urban.