Perpetual War, Ceaseless Crises, 13-15 June 2025

Welcome to the fourth edition of KOI’s Urban Inequalities Forum

13-15 June, Hall 3 „Cube Gallery“ at Toplocentrala, 5 Emil Bersinski St., Sofia.

From harbinger of liberal delusions about perpetual peace, capitalism has been exposed as the most aggressive vehicle of war, in every sense of the word. Тhe fossil assault on the climate articulates with and reinforces ongoing genocides and the ceaseless advance of the far-right. The 2025 edition of the Urban Inequalities Forum takes a critical look at the ways in which endless wars and militarization – capitalism’s responses to the ongoing polycrisis – are re/shaping the urban fabric. 

Conservative general Carl von Clausewitz famously defined war as another means for carrying out politics, thus breaking with the conventional figuring of war as a state of exception. On their part, Marxists have always seen war as the imperialist continuation of capitalist expansion, necessitating a search for ways to turn imperialist war into revolutionary. To this end, Marxism triangulates the classical state-centric bias of war by introducing non-state actors into the analysis of the antagonism: partisans, revolutionary masses, working-class parties, and sadly, fascist paramilitaries.

As the war in Ukraine has shown, war can also create its own economic dynamic that sustains urban and national economies and which autonomizes it from politics, testing the limits of the functionalist understanding of war. Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza, which has continued for over a year and expanded to the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria is too a case in point, operationaliзing military interventions for neoliberal real estate redevelopment 

War evolves. Modernity inaugurated total war, revolutionary and decolonizing wars heralded its massification, the so-called war on terror eroded the post-WWII human rights regime, while ‘hybrid wars’ of late are said to blur the boundary between military and civil society, yanking the Habermasian public sphere from its lofty liberal pillars. At the same time the livestreaming and mediatization of war and genocide has reached levels never previously imagined.

What has become of war after the putative end of politics and ideology, and the victory of global neoliberalism and the relentless progress of technology? How does war differ when observed from a Global South, rather than a Global North perspective? Now do automation, new advances in military technology, and the application of AI to war change its space, dynamics and temporality? What about the role of privatization? 

The fusion of government and privately funded security tools is particularly painful in urban environments, where smart city technologies perfect population control and criminalize welfare claimants, while predictive policing and mass surveillance, especially over migrant and working-class areas, exacerbate existing social and spatial inequalities. The widespread deployment of drones and autonomous surveillance systems further erodes privacy and civil liberties. Has the privatization of security, driven by tech giants and defense contractors, shifted power from public accountability to corporate profit? 

Can technology alleviate poverty or has it been conducive to its criminalization? Intelligent systems for governance and control have migrated between military and welfare uses. Refugee camps and informal settlements become sites of high-tech containment, where biometric surveillance dictates access to welfare. The same technologies that enable seamless logistics and infrastructure in wealthy urban centers contribute to militarized border enforcement and exclusionary urban planning elsewhere. 

Given settler colonial histories and the trade & plantation outposts they have sprouted, how can we conceptualize the ‘productive’ aspects of war on cities and their peri-urban hinterlands? How to make sense of the sensorial aspects of war, its sound-, memory-, and scents-scapes?

In the wake of the terraforming, domicidal, and ecocidal aspects of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, how can we conceptualize the relationship between war, imperialism, space (including nature), climate, and social reproduction? How does exterminatory war and urbicide figure in techno futuristic visions of urban development, as evidenced by plans to ‘rebuild Gaza differently’?

How do interlocking forms of war – conventional, imperialist, civil, racial, gender, environmental – unfold and bear on the urban fabric, physical as well as immaterial? How is the relationship between surveillance technology, urban space, AI and policing shaped by militarization and the legacy of military technology? As cities become testing grounds for military-civilian technological convergence, the challenge is to reclaim urban life from the grip of war, surveillance, and control.

Тruth is the first casualty of war. Democracy is the second. As wars expand – along with the assault on the climate and other life-supporting systems of our planet – urban life becomes increasingly subjected to militaristic regimes of control and thus spaces for critical discussion and democratic political action shrink. One needs look no further than the ever-escalating repressions against dissidents in Russia, as well as pro-Palestinian voices in the West. 

With all this in mind, join us for a three-day international conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, to interrogate perpetual war in times of ceaseless crises. We look forward to a rousing, critical discussion with academics, researchers, activists, and organizers committed to exploring, exposing, and resisting the deepening fault lines of war and its many casualties in the 21st century.

Programme

Friday, 13 June

Saturday, 14 June

Sunday, 15 June