Life under Pressure. Political Intervention in the Face of Urbicide

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Susanne Krasmann
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 544962752

In these times of multiplying crises and insecurities, the value of life has become a matter of growing concern. This is not only the case in the context of disaster and emergency management with its focus on prioritisation. Rather, questions of life have also forcefully entered the political arena: What does liveable life mean in the face of a dramatically shrinking habitability of the planet due to climate change? How to deal with increasingly contested energy resources on a global scale? And how to defend one’s own way of life against the rising influence of autocratic regimes? Life is a fundamental question of security but rarely theoretically and empirically explicated in security studies: what deserves protection is also what is considered valuable in life. The project addresses this crucial question through the study of ‘urbicide’. This notion, it argues, is paradigmatic for encompassing a wide range of aspects of what matters in life – and what is threatened and destroyed when urban areas are systematically targeted in violent conflict or war. Urbicide is more than the destruction of buildings and infrastructure, it essentially affects the lives of citizens: their habitat and livelihoods, and their way of life. Urbicide is a form of wiping out people's ability to exist. As a specific form of political violence, urbicide is understood in this project as both an analytical category and an empirical phenomenon. The study focuses on the case of urbicide that is still taking place in Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion. First, the project asks how ‘life’ becomes a matter of public concern in the country in the face of devastated landscapes, be it architecture, infrastructure, urban spaces or the natural environment. It explores how the destruction of the built environment is experienced as a loss, and how this experience feeds into projects and plans for reconstruction as well as into future visions of life. Second, since urbicide is a political rather than a legal concept, the project examines how the notion of urbicide is brought into play in claims for protection and appeals to international law. In doing so, it investigates how Ukrainian concerns connect to security issues on a global scale. Through the notion of urbicide, the project promotes a concept of security that transcends common divisions such as those between nature and culture, or human and non-human security. Furthermore, exploring the value of life in people's quest for security and protection is key to understanding what the state's promise of security means for contemporary societies.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5870: The Promise of Security in Catastrophic Times