18-21 June 2026, Toplotsentrala, Sofia, Bulgaria
Giorgio Agamben once argued that the post-9/11 world is one where security moves from a state of exception to the unexceptional. Across Europe and beyond, cities are increasingly governed through militarized logics of security. Surveillance technologies, data-driven policing, and militarized urban infrastructures are reshaping everyday life, often under the banners of public safety, smart governance, and climate adaptation. These developments are not neutral. They concentrate power in the hands of states and private corporations, disproportionately target working-class and racialized communities, and erode democratic space by criminalizing dissent and normalizing control. The city has become a key site where global crises — war, genocide, international legal order breakdown, climate emergency, and economic volatility — translate into new regimes of surveillance and policing. And of capital accumulation.
The 2026 edition of the Urban Inequalities Forum focuses on the securitization of cities as a central driver of inequality. From predictive policing and biometric border controls to the spread of military-grade technologies into municipal governance, urban spaces increasingly function as laboratories for techniques of control first developed in contexts of war, occupation, and counterinsurgency. These practices circulate transnationally, linking zones of open conflict with “peaceful” cities through shared infrastructures of data extraction, surveillance, and repression. Yet aided by the consent-manufacturing industry, public debate overwhelmingly treats these developments as technical solutions rather than political choices, sidelining questions of class, power asymmetries (sexed, ethnicized, racialized), and social justice.
The Forum aims to open a critical space for examining how securitization reshapes urban life and whose interests it serves. Bringing together scholars, activists, journalists, urban practitioners, and community organizers, the Forum foregrounds the perspectives of those most affected by surveillance and policing: workers, migrants, Roma communities, and political activists. Shortly, the Others of capital. By connecting local experiences in Bulgaria with global debates on militarization, data capitalism, and urban governance, the Forum seeks to challenge the normalization of security as repression and to refocus it into care, equality, welfare and democratic participation.
Organised by Association KOI, the Urban Inequalities Forum builds on several years of socially engaged research, public exhibitions, and municipal outreach. As a collective of sociologists, philosophers, and cultural workers, KOI combines critical analysis with public intervention, translating complex debates into accessible formats and creating spaces for dialogue beyond academic and policy circles. In a political environment where security increasingly crowds out social justice, the Forum positions itself as a rare platform for militant criticism of the violent forces shaping the militarized city, and for fashioning the much-needed emergency brake capable of ushering in a real state of exception.
Join us for four electrifying days of discussions and lectures at Toplotsentrala Regional Contemporary Arts Center in Sofia, Bulgaria (5, Emil Bersinski str). We begin on 18th of June, 11:30am sharp.
Program
Thursday, 18 June
| 12.00 – 13.30 | Spaces of Protests and Violence Standing Still on the Sidewalk: Protest, Security, and the Remaking of Urban Space in Georgia Esma Berikishvili Academic Freedom and Campus Security: The Impossible Neutrality of Universities in Times of War Jihane Sfeir Militarising for Israel: Romania’s complicity with genocide and lessons from the national ELBIT OUT! campaign Oana Uiorean |
| 14.30 – 16.00 | Keynote lecture Counter-Mapping Israel’s Humanitarian Performance in the Current Gaza War Yaakov Garb |
Friday, 19 June
| 10.00 – 11.30 | Infrastructures of Securitization On smartness, finance, and integrity in the Silicon Savannah Andrea Pollio Every City into Gaza: On Palantir and the Homecoming of Algorithmic Warfare Henning Lahmann Shutoff urbanism: governing the city through water debt Filippo Menga |
| 12.00 – 13.30 | Militarism and the Media From War Profiteering to Urban Control: Quantifying Corporate Power in the Military-Industrial-Media Complex Fabio Ashtar Telarico Deconstructing Bulgarian intellectual elites’ tacit support for Israeli atrocities Nikola Venkov-Rose Boris Buden |
| 14.30 – 16.00 | Legacies of Counter-Insurgency “The Chemistry of Erasure”: An Investigation into the Lineage and Use of Thermobaric Bombs, from Vietnam to Palestine [Work-in-Progress] Samer Abdelnour The Making of the Post-9/11 World of Unexceptional Security: A Historical Examination of Zionism and the Fabrication of “terrorism” Madhumita Varma Surveillance of revolutionary politics in the post-WWI Middle East Burak Sayım |
Saturday, 20 June
| 12.00 – 13.30 | Architecture: Spaces of Surveillance CITIZENS OF NO PLACE Re-reading 20th-Century Architectural Utopias in the Age of Smart Surveillance and Control Aneta Vassileva Architecture as Violence: On Corporate Regimes of Control and Urbanalization of Post-Socialist Cities of Prague, Brno and Bratislava Maria Topolcanska Ljubo Georgiev |
| 14.30 – 16.00 | Security and Insititutional Crisis Polycrisis: An Accelerator of the Techno-Police State in the Nordics Vasilis Galis Socialist International Politics and the Counter-revolution: Reappraisal for the Great Transition Ovidiu Tichindeleanu |
| 16.30 – 18.00 | Legacies of Jewish Progressive Politics Beyond Zionism: A Personal Reckoning with Occupation and Inequality Ruth Peri Vasileva Making the Diasporic City: European Jewish Dwelling from Securitization to the Subversion of Citizenship Joseph Grim Feinberg Doykayt in a Time of Reaction: Jewish Radical Traditions Amid Contemporary FarRight Nationalisms Anita Zsurzsán |
Sunday, 21 June
| 10.00 – 11.30 | Geographies of Exploitation and Extractivism Zifzif: Resource Extraction and the Destruction of the Coast in Palestine Dotan Halevy Capitalist Control over Body and Soul. Surveillance in the Global Factory and the Pitfalls of the Neo-Feudalism & Techno-Fascism Theses Patrick Neveling |
| 12.00 – 13.30 | Urban Restructuring and Intersectionality How the Bulgarian State Transforms Exclusion into a National Security Threat Mihail Mishev Capital and „safe” cities seen through the lenses of femicide. A Gendered (and Class) Based Critique of Space, Surveillance and Security Oana Mateescu and Dana Domșodi In the Name of Women: Gender, Security, and the Rescue Narrative in Post-War Prishtina Donika Çapriqi |
| 14.30 – 16.00 | Care and Protection in Lieu of Security From Urban Securitization to Self-defence in Serbia Ana Vilenica Wounded landscapes and bodies. Place-claiming and life-sustaining in the Colombian armed conflict María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra Between research and protective presence: ethnographing securitization in the occupied Palestinian territories Albane Buriel |
| 16.30 – 18.00 | Architecture walk with Aneta Vassileva |
