Lunch Talk by Ronay Bakan, organized by ACCS and the RPA Conflict & Society
Date 12 March 2026 | Time12:00 -13:30 | Location Roeterseilandcampus – Room B3.05
Emerging technologies of war and counterinsurgency increasingly target urban landscapes, populations, and infrastructures. This talk will explore the role of the built environment in counterinsurgency campaigns. Dr. Bakan will address questions such as: Why do states expend the time and resources to engage in developmental projects targeting urban spaces in the midst of counterinsurgency campaigns? What is the spectrum of tactics so used? How do inhabitants whose self-identity is shaped, in part, through attachments to urban landscapes conceive, adopt, or repurpose the land-heritage-military nexus in the everyday?
Focusing on the civil war between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the Turkish state, Dr. Bakan argues that states intervene in the everyday environment of ostensibly unruly populations as part of a broader security strategy to prevent future insurgent formation. She terms this set of processes “counterinsurgent urbanism.”
She identifies three core mechanisms of counterinsurgent urbanism: legal-institutional restructuring of land; policing of the urban landscape; and selective development. Her research draws on a multi-method approach that includes urban ethnography, in-depth interviews, neighbourhood mapping, photography, tourism surveys, and archival research to demonstrate how everyday, non-spectacular forms of violence operate in global counterinsurgencies.
This talk is co-organised by the Amsterdam Centre for Conflict Studies (ACCS) and the RPA Conflict & Society.
About the speaker
Dr. Ronay Bakan is currently a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute and incoming Assistant Professor at Fordham University/USA. She works on Kurdish insurgency and Turkey’s urban policies of counter-insurgent action.
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