Reactions: The new (para-) military urbanism

In this chapter I argue that the new wave of urban guerrillas needs to be countered by appropriate counter-measures by law enforcement, paramilitary and military forces who also have to move into cities in order to defend them. I start the chapter with a more detailed introduction into the art of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP), commenting on the difficulties of protecting our open societies against modern forms of terrorism or ‘urban guerrilla warfare’. Next, I critically discuss the two basic (ideal type) models on how to respond to the terrorist threat: the Criminal Justice Model (CJM) and the War Model (WM). Drawing on riots in a number of French banlieues (suburbs) and on the London 2011 riots, I also point out that terrorists are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the outbreak of latent conflicts in modern urban sprawls. I conclude this section with a first brief look at the question of how far liberal democracies can go in order to respond to the terrorist threat.