Between 1950 and 1995, the number of cities in the developed world with populations greater than one million increased from 49 to 112, while such cities in the developing world increased from 34 to 213 over the same period of time.¹ The names of cities like Grozny, Mogadishu and Kigali feature most prominently in the news coverage of the world’s most intense conflicts, having gained strategic relevance through the migration of masses to urban centres. In a world facing unprecedented population growth and accompanying urbanisation, logic dictates that the trend of the post-Cold War era towards the urbanisation of conflict is set to continue.

When Europe experienced high-intensity urbanisation from the middle of the 19th century onwards, it was as a direct consequence of industrialisation and the need of the then dreaded ‘satanic mills’ for the labour of young men from a demographically saturated countryside. The role of the industrial revolution in terms of technological, economic, social and political development cannot be over-emphasised and is generally regarded as having been the pivotal development ‘kick-start’ into modernity. Urban centres have served both as ‘melting pots’ for compatible cultures and as ‘powder kegs’ for incompatible cultures. The world has witnessed cosmopolitan ‘New Yorks’ emerge and equally cosmopolitan ‘Beiruts’ submerge into endemic violence. More often than not, in the presence of incompatible cultures and/or long-term ethnic hatred, urban centres have provided the stage for Israel’s Intifada and South Africa’s state of emergency. In all cases where urban centres have become and remained unstable over longer periods of time, a crucial factor has been the demographic changes which, to a large degree, facilitated the destabilisation. The migration of people of a different culture to a particular area or the so-called ‘out-falling’ — the numerical growth of one population group exceeding that of another competing one — has often triggered unrest and civil war. Ethnic settlement patterns are not new phenomena and constitute a normal phase of overall migration patterns, in many cases diluting over time or blending in with the dominant culture, provided it is value-compatible.

Urbanisation in the developing world, in stark contrast, is a process accompanied by little, if any, significant development spinoffs that could be described as positive. In sub-Saharan Africa, the annual population growth rate of three per cent exceeds the world average of 1,6 per cent. It also exceeds the global rate of urban growth with a stunning 5,8 per cent between 1965 to 1980, and 5,9 per cent since then. Unlike in Asia and parts of the Middle East, this urbanisation occurs with no industrial growth to support it. In fact, while food production has increased in the developing countries by nine per cent during the 1990s, Africa’s dropped by six per cent.² The cities in Asia and the Middle East are not in any process of infrastructural expansion, but in fact, are often imploding due to infrastructural overload. This type of urbanisation is therefore not taking place due to any ‘pull’ factors of development in the cities, but due to the ‘push’ factors of environmental overload and degradation, resource scarcity and conflict in the rural areas. It is the promise of a better future, rather than the actual prospects for one, that causes people to migrate to the ‘streets paved with gold’ of faraway cities. Ethnic and family ties provide migrants with a natural link between rural and urban areas, with many squatter camps and urban areas ethnically comprising almost homogeneous units for practical purposes of accommodation and shelter, employment prospects or advice on general aspects of life in a foreign environment.

Migrants often face conditions of urban squalor in shanty towns that are much the same as those they left behind. Over-population on its own can already stretch the limited natural resources, but in combination with underdevelopment and equally limited financial resources and skills, such problems can become almost insurmountable and tie countries down in vicious cycles of poverty and violence. Nairobi loses sixty per cent of its drinking water due to the fact that water pipes in the city are leaking; Khartoum’s population, on average, spends about two-thirds of their income for the provision of water.³ Water shortages are feared to become a greater issue in this century than oil was in the last one. In 1995, the World Bank warned in a report that eighty countries, particularly in Africa and the Middle East, face water shortages that seriously threaten their agriculture, industry and health.⁴ A UN study on this matter has also identified numerous areas where severe water shortages can be expected to occur. Major cities like Cairo, Beijing, Shanghai, Bombay, Calcutta and Mexico City are affected, all of which are suffering from significant population pressures and are expected to be placed under even more severe strain by the fact that the developing world’s population are urbanising at such a pace that two-thirds are expected to be residing in cities such as those mentioned above by 2025. In China, 300 cities are experiencing water shortages.⁵

The South African rural/urban population distribution in 1996 indicated that sixty per cent lived in urban areas. It placed about eighteen million people in rural areas, another four million in small towns, and between 21 and 22 million in large towns, cities and metropolitan areas.⁶ Sixty per cent of the urban population, in turn, lives under the poverty line.⁷ The population in South Africa’s cities are growing at an annual rate of approximately one million people, overloading the cities’ capacity to provide basic services and creating a growing shortage of housing and other facilities. This number is considerably higher than the annual estimate of 750 000 that was predicted as recently as 1989.⁸ Urbanisation seems to be taking place at a pace unprecedented in South African history, its speed making the country’s cities among the fastest growing urban centres in the world, with Durban having doubled in size between 1970 and 1980. It grew by a further 77 per cent until 1985.⁹ Gauteng’s population, due to its comparatively highly attractive urban infrastructure and job opportunities, is also expected to double in size, from seven million to between thirteen and fourteen million people in the fourteen years between 1997 and 2011.¹⁰ The national housing backlog stands at about 1,7 million units, with an annual widening of the gap by an estimated 175 000 at the current pace of the housing programmes.¹¹ Rapid population growth and urbanisation cause so-called megacities, like Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City and Cairo, with a combination of developed and underdeveloped parts, creating an image of overall decay as their tax base erodes as a result of wealthier citizens trying to evade crime by moving out en masse, the deteriorating quality of life, and the high costs of providing additional services for the poorer masses.¹² The central business districts of South Africa’s major cities are already in an advanced stage of decay,¹³ while crime and squatting are also starting to impact on the suburbs with multiplying squatter camps becoming established adjacent to high-income areas like Sandton or Hout Bay. In many instances, these settlements also affect the major arteries of communications — the highways to and from the economic centres of the country.

One explanation for this upward adjustment of the original estimates can be found in the southward shift of the poverty belt and increasing numbers of refugees of violence and poverty from other African countries. Notable is the correlation between the level of violence and the level of high-density populations, with Rwanda and Burundi being the two most densely populated countries in Africa. Under-developed environments with high population densities, and their inherently higher intensity of direct competition for resources, generally appear to generate extreme levels of instability. Migration to cities like Kinshasa, for example, has been characterised by near anarchy.¹⁴ In the presence of an ethnic dimension — in terms of settlement patterns being predominantly ethnic and increasingly resistant to the ‘detribalisation’ effect traditionally associated with urbanisation — the problem is exacerbated by an ethnically segmented and crowded demography.¹⁵ Sporadic ethnic violence affects more African cities in shorter intervals, with Nigeria’s most populous city, Lagos, having been ravaged by increasing sporadic outbreaks of violence between ethnic Ijaw and Yoruba.¹⁶ Almost the entire West African slaughter in the failed states of Liberia and Sierra Leone is taking place in the burnt-out ruins and seas of squatter camps. The situation is so bad that journalists report very little, largely due to the fact that their own chances of survival are not particularly good in areas where even the last remnants of civil order have been replaced by tribal savagery that far exceeds the descriptive ability of language.

It is not only the developmental periphery that faces these conditions, albeit only in a more intense form. Ironically, it is often modern technology that, on the one hand, stands in the way of the integration of foreign migrants in modern cities through the reduction of everyday integration incentives due to satellite communication — from banking to television, cellular phones and the Internet — that, on the other hand, enables immigrants to retain strong bonds with their countries of origin. These ethnic diasporas not only compete collectively for resources such as employment, housing and social services, but they also often represent the interests of the motherland and/or transfer conflicts from there to the host country. In the worst case scenario, entire urban neighbourhoods reflect the culture of the migrants rather than that of the indigenous population, which by then have fled into other areas. The so-called ‘psychological geography’ no longer regards the area as a part of the host country, but as an integral part of the home country and therefore a de facto ethno-cultural conquest. This manifests itself in the fact that many Western cities already experience serious challenges to the official authority, and invest much time and energy in the management of the apparently inevitable ethnification of their cities. Gone are the days of the ‘bobby on the beat’, unarmed and mostly unchallenged. Today, special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams and the paramilitary training of police forces are the realities which have replaced the whistle and the baton as the symbols of law and order.

Outside the development core, cities have lost or are in the process of losing administrative control over the ethnic pockets in metropolitan areas. Cities like Johannesburg are not likely to make much sustainable progress in the major revamping programmes aimed at stemming inner city decay, as long as squatter settlements are creating an impenetrable belt of squalor choking the main access routes, and as long as a basic culture of civil order and responsibility remains a foreign concept.

In the presence of an oversupply of literature dealing in an abstract and academic fashion with the question, ‘Why are they killing each other?’, a brief consideration of the basics of human conflict is required in order to bring home a number of important points about the characteristics of urban conflict and the relevance of the assumptions generally made.

The scarcity of resources and the competition for access to them are generally accepted as some of the root causes of human conflict. That this competition, and consequently the resulting conflict potential, is at its most intense in those areas where humans are concentrated, has already been mentioned. considering the various types of scarcity, three types can be identified:

supply-induced scarcity, caused by both degradation and the depletion of resources;



demand-induced scarcity, caused by population growth or increased per capita consumption; and



structurally induced scarcity, caused by unequal distribution of resources. This may be the result of unfavourable geography, in the case of interstate inequality of available resources, or policy, as in the case of intrastate distribution of resources — for example, apartheid or the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP).¹⁷

In South Africa, the intensification of competition has historically been of sporadic and periodic nature, evident in the widespread displacement of competing population segments, such as the Khoisan and Bantu by Nguni and Europeans. The problem acquired a new dimension during the colonisation era, with the accompanying increase in agricultural output and the introduction of medicine. Pre-colonial annual fertility rates among the indigenous population, of approximately 45 per 1 000 were countered by the high mortality rates of between 35 and 40 per 1 000, providing for an average one per cent population growth or less, as well as relative underpopulation in relation to the land and resources available. The above European influences altered the demographic trend dramatically with a 3,2 per cent population growth in 1960, more than three times the growth rate in pre-colonial times.

A further increase was seen in the number of domestic animals in relation to the population, particularly the number of goats which are known for their destructive capacity. This resulted in a proportional increase in overgrazing and general environmental degradation, particularly in view of the fact that the land policy of the previous South African government restricted the territorial expansion of the rapidly growing population in what later became known as the homelands. This in turn, accelerated the rate of urbanisation and promoted the migrant labour system with its well-documented influences on urban violence and social decay in the areas of origin. The accompanying factors of poverty, squalor, hopelessness, stress, and the decline of traditional cultural restraints are conducive to high levels of urban violence and resource-based political conflict even in the absence of any ethnic dimension. Dwindling natural resources generally weaken any government’s administrative capabilities and its ability to project power and authority, allowing for violent challenges by groups who pursue ideologically or ethnically motivated political objectives.¹⁸ It might be added that such conditions lend themselves particularly to ethnic mobilisation in pursuit of access to resources, as this then constitutes a survival imperative — the higher the level of ethnic mobilisation, the greater the chances of success during intense competition.

While these explanations are relevant, they tend to neglect the cultural dimension of human behaviour and consequently overemphasise the assumed impact of socio-economic adjustments on the prospects for conflict resolution. When two out of three cattle in Zululand still die of natural causes, and malnutrition among children remains a widespread problem, then the causes of the scarcity of grazing and agricultural land, as well as the nutritional deficiencies among the population, all acquire a cultural dimension, both in the explanation and resolution of the problem.¹⁹ However, overgrazing and the subsequent soil erosion or desertification, though worse, are not limited to black farmers. The Karoo, traditionally mainly farmed by whites, has invaded 207 000 square kilometres between 1870 and 1970, 290 kilometres in the first half of this century, and a further seventy kilometres in the twenty years between 1953 to 1973.²⁰ Countrywide annual soil loss, due to erosion, is between 300 and 400 million tons. If this was loaded onto seven ton trucks and parked bumper to bumper, these would stretch seven and a half times around the circumference of the globe.²¹ Not all evils can be explained by apartheid or colonialism, with cultural influences providing sufficient causal factors for both environmental deterioration and the prevalence of conflict.

The abundance of evidence — in support of explanations which indicate that cultures differ substantially from one another in term of value systems and that their development priorities are indeed not the same — is so vast that it is difficult to see how the conventional non-cultural explanation can be so persistently upheld. A cursory look at the squatter camps of sub-Saharan Africa, and a comparison with those of the exploding population of Istanbul make it clear that resource scarcity in both cases creates numerous problems. In the case of the latter, it has not resulted in the total collapse of order.²² This is predominantly the case because a basic sense of order is part of the cultural capital of the Anatolian migrants, manifesting itself also in the re-Islamification currently taking place among the urban poor of Turkey.

Numerous studies indicate that, even under ideal conditions, humanity is an intricately diverse concept. Were one, for example, to reduce all the differences in the value systems of the various cultures down to a mere ten categories, simple arithmetic allows for at least 3 628 800 ways of arranging them in order of priority.²³ On the other hand, value systems are not rigid and tend to adapt to a changing environment. The role of women, for example, has been seen to change with increased modernisation, along with numerous other values which seem subject to changes in the external environment. This is often and wrongly assumed as evidence that quations of ethnocultural identity can be readily manipulated and resolved through social engineering. In reality, diversity is never as much of a ‘strength’ as many pseudo-intellectual slogans tend to suggest, particularly when fundamentally incompatible cultures and/or value systems are involved, and are extremely frustrated by forced co-existence.

Understanding the above is relevant to this topic in so far as the current strategies aimed at dealing with the urbanisation and ethnification of urban populations are based on the flawed assumptions of cultural equality theories. These focus primarily on what the people in conflict areas presumably need to be taught — ‘democracy’ naturally holding the unchallenged first place on the list of priorities of peace activists — rather than on what they are willing and able to learn. Such theories assume that all people, individuals and groups alike, would respond more or less equally under similar circumstances. They furthermore assume simplistically that every human is potentially a good capitalist and democrat. Yet, different cultural groups, as the African-American economist Thomas Sowell²⁴ points out, are in possession of different ‘cultural capital’, hold very different ideas on right and wrong, religion and the state, men and women, war and peace, and more. All that the peace industry has been able to present in response, is a vague and assumed common denominator of ‘peace and democracy’, often without realising that these concepts are propagated from a Western point of view and transported almost entirely by the Western infrastructure provided by international organisations such as the UN.

Ironically, the scholars, observers or activists found in the development field and in the peace industry — generally leaning to the left, ideologically — seem to be in total agreement with the military opinion on aspects of peacekeeping, albeit for different reasons. Both accept the above paradigm and regard ‘socio-economic upliftment’ and ‘democracy’ as the magic wands that will ultimately bring about peace.

The first time that the military and the peace industry were seen to adopt the same paradigm, was when they were on opposing sides of the US-involvement during the Vietnam conflict. Since 1962, the conflict here — for the first time in modern military history — was essentially regarded by the military as one requiring sociological answers more or less along the lines of "The Communists can exploit socio-economic and social instability. The task of the military is to create stability and thereby provide the environment for nation-building, which in turn will deprive the Communists the grounds for mobilisation." To those who recall the days of ‘Total Onslaught’, this may sound familiar, primarily because this paradigm had by then become the foundation of almost every counterinsurgency textbook world-wide. The task of the military was to create the conditions of stability for solving the socio-economic crisis, deemed necessary for allowing nationbuilding to succeed.²⁵ Indeed, the same arguments are raised today with regard to most of the conflicts facing the world, with the bottom line being, ‘take away inequality and socio-economic hardship, and peace is assured’. Marxists, anti-Marxists, modernists, post-modernists, socialists and capitalists essentially agree on the core issues of the problem, while all more or less ignore the cultural dimension.

There are two main developments which observers of conflict should take into account.

The re-emergence of ethnicity as a factor that was previously declared ‘dead’, can be largely attributed to the fact that the ideological era made less of an impression on people than what academics previously thought. The re-emergence of ethnic ties and traditions which had been thought dead, is adequately illustrated by the disintegration of Indonesia and the intensification of urban ethnic clashes in other parts of the world. Had academics and politicians bothered to look deeper into the developments already visible during the days of the Cold War, they would have seen sufficient evidence of the durability of ethnic ties. In Laos and Thailand, the Hmong are divided by the artificial colonial boundary. The Hmong on the Laotian side of the Mekong river called themselves ‘anti-Communists’ in their struggle against the government, while the Hmong on the Thai side of the river were ‘Communist insurgents’. Though it appears obvious in retrospect, the Hmong first and foremost fought against those who ruled over them and raised any opportune ideological flag that would get them arms and supplies. It is also interesting to note that the notoriously class struggle-oriented and anti-ethnic Communist parties were essentially ethnic in their composition in developing parts of the world. In the Punjab, the Communist Party was mainly a party of Sikhs, predominantly from the effluent Jat caste. In Mozambique, the Communists predominantly represented the Makonde; in Angola, the Kubundu; in Namibia, the Ovambo; and so on.²⁶

Consequently, one can actually speak of a post-Cold War normalisation, a return to the human ties which dominated the pre-ideological era and which have proven themselves to be reliable in times of crisis. The survival of ethnic units depends upon the existence of an equilibrium between the centrifugal and centripetal forces in each unit. Where centrifugal forces become predominant, the ethnic group disintegrates; where centripetal forces gain the upper hand, it ceases to exist as a result of petrification.²⁷

Those propagating assimilationist policies, even under seemingly suitable circumstances, often appear to show improper regard for time duration by failing to consider that attempts to telescope ‘assimilationist time’, through increasing the frequency and scope of inter-ethnic contacts, may produce a negative response. Disregarding this reality has resulted in the false belief that assimilation also lends itself readily to social engineering. Numerous examples of such attempts having actually increased the animosity between the various groups, exist in the well-documented responses by Walloons and Flemish, Quebecois and Anglo-Canadians, and other groups where integration objectives were initially thought to benefit from greater inter-ethnic contacts.²⁸

While some cultural groups are compatible in terms of their respective value systems, and therefore are able to co-exist more or less peacefully, other cultures are fundamentally incompatible, with each pursuing its own political and economic goals. An example of such ethnic groups in urban areas are the Chinese minorities in the island groups of southern Asia, often the victims of xenophobic outbreaks due to their economic achievements. Similar reactions can be found in the US, where Asians face little violence from whites, but are increasingly falling victim to violence perpetrated by African-Americans. Again, it is the apparent discrepancies in collective aims and achievements that stimulate group violence. Asians, including the impoverished Vietnamese ‘boat people’ of the 1970s, have displayed a remarkable proclivity towards socio-economic self-upliftment via small business development, while being strongly overrepresented in the faculties of the natural sciences, medicine and mathematics at universities, and including the winners of numerous prizes for academic achievement. The upward mobility of Asians, in general, destroys the myth of ‘structural discrimination’ or the ‘prejudice’ explanation so often advanced.²⁹ While seldom reported in the mainstream media, this situation is well-documented in studies conducted by the US government and other institutions. Similar discrepancies in terms of collective achievement contribute to conflicts throughout the world, and indicate that collectively and under identical circumstances, cultures do not excel in the same fields and, in fact, seem to differ significantly in terms of collective energy and capacity. In Belgium, for example, the Flemish attain higher maths and science scores than the Walloons, while the Scots attain better scores than the Irish. Cultures hold different levels of achievement and the greater the differences, the more likely they are to clash in areas where they are forced to compete.

In other cases, the discrepancies become even more apparent in the presence of traditional versus modern explanations for causes and effects of everyday occurrences. This is particularly a factor in South Africa where the role of traditional healers, as well as the role of superstition in explaining events, is increasingly enjoying public, albeit artificial elevation to the level of the rationality of science. Despite urbanisation, the number of muti shops are steadily growing, while the trade in human body parts has emerged as a serious problem, particularly in view of the fact that affluent businesspersons are often the customers for this kind of ‘lucky charm’ trade, combining their own modern Western lifestyle with traditional beliefs.³⁰ This situation is exacerbated by the inclination of prominent African leaders to resort to ‘blame culture’ explanations when dealing with the origins of economic decline or the prevalence of infectious disease. Zimbabwe’s late Joshua Nkomo did not hesitate to state publicly that AIDS was "... invented by whites to exterminate blacks", concluding furthermore that it "... unfortunately ... backfired, because they too are dying of it, but still they have the knowledge of its origins and how it can be cured. But they just do not want to share it with us."³¹

Finally, some cultures simply appear more violence-prone than others, or become so over a period of time. So-called ‘warrior cultures’ is what British historian John Keegan calls those ethnic groups when he writes:

"There are warrior peoples in many areas of the world, the Horn of Africa, the Himalayas, the Punjab. What makes them different from their neighbours — and from Western societies — is that they are brought up to fight, think fighting honourable and think killing in warfare glorious."³²

That these factors are seldom considered, is strongly related to the fact that the current heads of international organisations, relief and peace agencies mostly stem from an era where the equality of all cultures was assumed as a matter of principle.

Responses to negative urbanisation have been varied, but have persistently shown a trend towards abandoning certain areas after numerous attempted projects to stem the decay have failed. More and more cities in the US, for example, comprise such ‘irretrievable’ areas, predominantly occupied by ethnic pockets of either black or developing world immigrant populations. Other parts of the cities are also ethnified in terms of Koreans, Chinese and Anglo population concentrations, but do not resemble the lawlessness and hopelessness of areas such as East and North St Louis, most parts of Washington DC, Detroit and other cities.

While urban areas have traditionally changed from being predominantly Irish or German to being Italian or Korean, the gradual macro-demographic shifts in the United States since the changes to immigration legislation in the 1960s has seen the phenomenon of ‘white flight’ from urban centres altogether, accompanied by unprecedented urban decay. Integration measures, such as ‘bussing’, have been unsuccessful and merely resulted in whites moving even further away to the point where bussing was no longer practical. All this seems to prove that, where artificial integration measures are necessary, integration has already failed.

In fact, urban settlement patterns in a country that jettisoned its Euro-American identity in favour of a multicultural one, have reflected the polarisation of a population that also lost its sense of community. The number of American residential communities built by single developers and surrounded by a defensive perimeter with controlled access — siege architectural cluster home complexes — have increased from 1 000 in the 1960s, to around 90 000 by the end of the century. The central business district of Los Angeles has installed high-technology security systems that are able to seal off the groundfloors of office complexes with heavy fireproof barriers reminiscent of the fallgate systems of medieval castles, while tunnels and tubes connecting several high-rise offices make it unnecessary for any employee to use the streets or sidewalks. Public life is increasingly becoming optional for the middle and higher class in what constitutes a sterile environment increasingly void of communal ties. In addition, de-urbanisation of the higher middle class is resulting in rejuvenated rural towns becoming ‘novel communities’ comprising people earning their living with the assistance of high-technology development who have left the cities altogether.

Ethnically and racially, the country’s cities are more segregated at the beginning of the 21st century than they were in the previous one, despite the civil rights era and the dawn of social engineering.³³ Entire urban, previously vibrant, centres have become underpopulated zones without law or de facto government control, with empty streets void of shops, squatters in run-down apartment buildings whose owners have long since given up insisting on rent payments. The local police suffers from a lack of motivation and logistic bottlenecks, such as petrol shortages, directly related to a bankrupt local government whose potential taxbase has fled, or lives on welfare or crime.

Town councils that still have the means, and hold jurisdiction or responsibilities for such areas, are often held to ransom by so-called ‘community leaders’ who provide promises of peace in the streets if certain ‘development projects’ are initiated.³⁴ These projects are lucrative for the mostly self-appointed community leaders, who usually stand behind widespread beliefs of deliberate social discrimination and nurture a culture of entitlement that lends itself readily to ethnic mobilisation. These so-called ‘mythmakers' follow a modus operandi that some refer to as ‘the imperial culture of the slums’, also manifesting itself in a slightly different form in the deeply entrenched gang warfare in many US cities, where the culture of achievement has been replaced by a culture of resentment and entitlement. It is a kind of decline that is difficult to stop once it has gained a foothold.

The US military has also given some serious consideration of future scenarios where it could possibly face local uprisings in urban environments. Needless to say, Euro-America was never plagued by this level of potential fragmentation since the Civil War (1861-1865), and was able to rely on basic consensus over the core issues that ultimately determine the stability of a society — the rights and duties of the individual, the form of government, property rights, and the rule of law. All these components, constituting an unwritten value system, were also an integral part of the ethno-cultural value system among all European immigrants, widely understood and espected and thus not threatening the stability of the country. Today, this is no longer the case, because the basic assumption that the European value system is also universal, is fundamentally flawed.³⁵ The tolerance and individualism deeply embedded in Western civilisation are direct products of a number of specific developments, such as the age of enlightenment, that cannot be simply transferred to all cultures around the globe. This limitation of globalisation needs to be recognised.

In Africa, there have been little, if any, responses to urbanisation that would suggest the presence of any comprehensive strategy. The provision of ‘basic needs’ has been the sole response, and not always very successful for the simple reason that popular explanations, to some degree at least, tend to reflect ideology more than reality.

As a result, multi-ethnic societies have been forced to invest more in their own continued stability, including measures of repression, than actually getting on with development. Unable to formulate collective interests, due to their heterogeneous nature and the consequent inability to find sufficient common goals that could outweigh the collective self-interest of the various groups, the state and urban structures of authority have all but collapsed under the pressure of the aspirations of the masses which exceed the available resources.

In the final analysis, and by way of comparison, the benefits of culturally compatible or homogeneous societies over those lacking the ‘glue’ of a common value system can be discerned. During the Asian economic crises of 1998/99, the homogeneous South Korea saw people standing in queues to offer their personal and family jewellery in a national effort to provide financial relief for a hard-pressed country. Neighbouring Indonesia, comprising numerous ethnic groups, and therefore quite different from South Korea, was not able to overcome its crisis and is currently being torn apart by the consequences. Homogeneous societies and communities are more able to overcome economic and social crises, even generating solidarity to the point of self-sacrifice, unlike the almost predatory behaviour encountered among the population of heterogeneous states in crisis.

Given the fact that the world population continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace, and remain equally prone to urbanisation, the problems will increase. Also given the fact that a rich country such as the US has been unable to save its urban centres, and keep a lid on urban powder kegs by improving law enforcement measures with high-technology equipment, the prospects for any positive response — one which holds any realistic chance of success — appear increasingly sobering even to eternal optimists.

It would appear that the urbanisation of conflict, due to the pace and magnitude of urbanisation that exceeds the resources of most countries, can only be treated symptomatically. In environments where migratory patterns include ethnic dimensions, this seems even more true. There are no solutions to this reality unless migration can be redirected or prevented by means of alternative strategies. One approach could include the granting of greater cultural ‘breathing space’ to self-defined ethnocultural communities in some form of ‘self-rule with responsibility’ deal. Yet, while this may reduce the animosity of frustrated communities locked in urban decay, it does little to reduce the animosity between groups who will continue to compete with one another for resources, and whose behaviour towards each other will be influenced by a number of factors, not least of which being the numerical balance of power.

Given the situation described here, however, the state’s obligation to uphold law and order for all its citizens will only be met by a number of changes to the police and other law enforcement agencies of which the military meanwhile forms an integral part.

It will require a psychological paradigm shift by the élite, including the realisation and understanding that not all problems in the world can be resolved by negotiations and the demonstration of good intentions. In fact, demonstrating weakness can provoke predatory behaviour from those who are prone to violence, or who are culturally predisposed to consider violence as a legitimate means to resolve differences.

Secondly, it will require a paradigm shift in the training and deployment of security personnel. High-technology equipment with movement sensors and body armour will have to be included in the policing and urban law enforcement doctrines. High standards of physical fitness and section level command capabilities will be essential in dealing with the vertical ‘battlefield’ among decaying high-rise buildings that often serve as fortresses for warlords, druglords or criminal cartels.

In conjunction with this, training and equipment must make provision for the horizontal ‘battlefield’ of suburban squatter settlements, including the nerve-racking ‘noise levels’ of civilian crowds among whom the distinction between accomplice, sympathiser or passive bystander tends to become blurred as urban militias or criminals use human shields and the apparent helplessness of unarmed civilians against the forces of the state.³⁶

These are the basic steps that should be considered in the short term, while political solutions, such as the devolution of power, are factors that will bring some relief to some communities, but may not help in all cases.

The fact is that the conflicts of the future will evolve in urban centres and will also need to be solved there.