Baghdad Burning: neo-liberalism and the counter-city Derek Gregory Department of Geography University of British Columbia 217-1984 West Mall Vancouver British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z2 E-mail:
[email protected] Paper prepared for ‘What is new about “Neo-Liberal” Urbanism? Middle Eastern cities in comparative perspective’, Workshop 13, 12th Mediterranean Research Meeting, Florence, 6-9 April 2011 ! Baghdad Burning: neo-liberalism and the counter-city Derek Gregory Department of Geography University of British Columbia, Vancouver ‘Most people choose to ignore the little prefix “re–” in the words “rebuild” and “reconstruct”. For your information, “re” is of Latin origin and means “again” or “anew”. In other words – there was something there in the first place…. I always say this war is about oil but it is also about huge corporations that are going to make billions off reconstructing what was damaged during this war.’ Riverbend, ‘Baghdad Burning’, 28 August 2003 ‘All this chaos has somehow become uncomfortably normal. Two years ago I never would have dreamed of living like this – now this lifestyle has become the norm and I can barely remember having lived any other way.’ Riverbend, ‘Baghdad Burning’, 10 November 2004 Neo-liberalism and late modern war The systematic connections between neo-liberalism and late modern war have become something of a critical orthodoxy. For David Harvey, ‘the new imperialism’ (or ‘vulture capitalism’ as he also calls it) advances the catastrophically violent process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’: ‘All the neoconservatives have done’, he wrote in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, ‘is to transform the low-intensity warfare waged under neo-liberalism around the globe into a dramatic confrontation.’ 1 Similarly, Naomi Klein treats war as one of the modalities through which the ‘disaster capitalism’ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 David Harvey, The new imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) p.