When Americans think of modern warfare, what comes to mind is the US
army skirmishing with terrorists and insurgents in the mountains of
Afghanistan. But the face of global conflict is ever-changing. In Out
of the Mountains, David Kilcullen, one of the world's leading experts
on current and future conflict, offers a groundbreaking look at what may
happen after today's wars end. This is a book about future conflicts and
future cities, and about the challenges and opportunities that four
powerful megatrends - population, urbanization, coastal settlement, and
connectedness - are creating across the planet. And it is about what
cities, communities and businesses can do to prepare for a future in
which all aspects of human society - including, but not limited to,
conflict, crime and violence - are changing at an unprecedented pace.
Kilcullen argues that conflict is increasingly likely to occur in
sprawling coastal cities, in peri-urban slum settlements that are
enveloping many regions of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and
Asia, and in highly connected, electronically networked settings. He
suggests that cities, rather than countries, are the critical unit of
analysis for future conflict and that resiliency, not stability, will be
the key objective. Ranging across the globe - from Kingston to Mogadishu
to Lagos to Benghazi to Mumbai - he offers a unified theory of
"competitive control" that explains how nonstate armed groups such as
drug cartels, street gangs, and warlords draw their strength from local
populations, providing useful ideas for dealing with these groups and
with diffuse social conflicts in general. His extensive fieldwork on the
ground in a series of urban conflicts suggests that there will be no
military solution for many of the struggles we will face in the future.
We will need to involve local people deeply to address problems that
neither outsiders nor locals alone can solve, drawing on the insight
only locals can bring, together with outsider knowledge from fields like
urban planning, systems engineering, renewable energy, conflict
resolution, and mediation.
This deeply researched and compellingly argued book provides an
invaluable road map to a future that will increasingly be crowded,
urban, coastal, connected - and dangerous.
