 The US Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well good afternoon and welcome back to the 11th issues in national security lecture for this academic year. I'm Professor John Jackson and I'll serve as the host for today's event. To kick off the event, we'd like to call on Admiral Chatfield for her greetings. Admiral? Well thank you Professor Jackson and thank you Professor Norton for joining us today. We're looking forward to your lecture. I'm here with David Scoville, my husband, and we're delighted to welcome you all to the issues in national security lecture series. It's so nice to see some familiar faces out there and I would call you all out but I want to really get to the subject matter at hand. I think David will be introducing our family support group lecture and so I just want to welcome you and thank you for being here as a participant in our national security lecture series. Thank you Admiral David. As I mentioned at each lecture with these lectures are originally established to provide a way to give the spouses and significant others of our students a taste of what the Naval War College experience is like. Well we've expanded that now and we're very glad to have people from all around the world joining us, Naval War College Foundation, members, international sponsors, and many others and it's an absolute pleasure to have you with us. We'll be doing an additional seven lectures between now and May of 2021 so we hope you can come back. An announcement detailing the various dates, topics, and speakers of each lecture will be posted by our public affairs office. Looking ahead on Tuesday the 23rd of February we'll hear from Professor Peter Dutton who will speak about the strategic dynamics of the South China Sea. So on with the main event please feel free to ask questions using the chat function of Zoom and we'll get to them at the conclusion of our presentation. I suspect that many of you have joined us today to learn what a feral city might be. The dictionary defines feral as existing in a wild or untamed state and the term feral cats refers to those annoying cats that live a wild existence in our neighborhoods. In his groundbreaking research Dr. Rick Norton coined the term feral cities to describe a huge metropolitan area with a population of more than one million people that is largely ungoverned and out of control. This afternoon he will discuss the implications of feral cities and will describe ways that the international community can deal with them. Professor Norton is a graduate of Tulane University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He's also a retired United States Navy commander. While in the Navy he served extensively at sea on cruisers and destroyers as well as short tours in the Navy's Office of Legislative Affairs and on the Navy staff. His regional areas of expertise include Africa and South America. Well before someone labels my control of this lecture series as feral I'd like to pass the baton on to Professor Rick Norton. Rick. Thank you John and thank you Radcl. It's a pleasure to be back at the lecture series and without further ado permit me to share my screen and we'll get going. There we go. Well as John mentioned it's probably not a bad idea to start out with definitions and so my definition which is in the state of flux as is research always. It's a feral city could be defined as a metropolis in which the government has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city's boundaries but the city remains a functioning actor in the greater international political system. Back in 2004 when the idea first occurred to me the research was could this happen and since then it's been more of a documentation of how it's happening and some of the new permutations that are being involved with this. Well we're going to start off with a basic. Some of you may have come across this fact way before but humans are now urban animals. More of us live in a city today than live on farms or in rural environments and it's going to keep going that way and this is not an issue of controversy. Everybody agrees on it including the United Nations and you can see from the chart on the upper left that Africa and is going to be the next major growth area of population in urban environment and you will see that this is indeed the case. Cities it's interesting when you talk about cities what people's what images come to people's minds. My favorite description is they are gleaming poetry and steel and glass that were the best of us kind of congregate where you can get a slice of pizza at three three in the morning and find a bookstore to vote it exclusively to mystery novels. That's true but cities can also be zones of despair and equality poverty crime ecological disasters and both can exist within the same geographic area. It makes them a uniquely man made phenomenon and and more than deserving of study and there is a lot of literature out there about how to keep cities healthy how to make cities healthy how to build cities healthy and we'll talk about that. All right we talked about growth well last year India dominated the fastest growing cities in the world. Today it's the continent of Africa and from Tete Mozambique to Burjumbura Burundi African cities are on the rise. This is going to probably be a kids affair for some time and you can see for yourself some of them are it's interesting that Tanzania has two and so does Niger and so does the DRC. Okay there was a period of time when one of the most serious questions about the research was do feral cities occur more frequently in fragile states and failed in fragile states the research in that developed about the same time I started looking at feral cities a former professor at the war college jimmy school was integral to that research and the surprising answer was no there does not appear to be a connection between fragile states and feral cities although some feral cities are in fragile states but cities that were developed determined to be fragile I'm sorry you can see from the you can see from the slide that there's a lot more red in non-fragile states than there are in fragile states in fact 2037 cities are in non-fragile states and only 99 are in fragile ones. This has been a tried and true slide from me for almost a decade and it's reasonable to ask is Mogadishu still the postal feral city and by all statistics accounts etc the answer is yes and so Mogadishu remains feral or at least more feral than not and it demonstrates how hard it is to recover from an episode of true ferrari and during the Somali civil war operation blackhawk down etc it was bad and has not necessarily gotten all that much better although it is better in order to determine where feral cities come from and where they might be going I developed this kind of diagnostic tool and it's although it's an eye chart for which I apologize it's fairly simple to understand when I was in the Navy we loved stoplight charts and this is a stoplight chart green is good yellow is caution and red is bad and this is a way to take a snapshot of a city and I've divided this over time originally there were four there were four categories now there are five there may be six the categories were governance economy services security and civil society and it's pretty easy to kind of figure out what you would want to find in a green city everything from good government not corrupt you don't have to pay a bribe for everything you do for services the economy is robust for lots of foreign investment civil society people get along it's rich robust they're the relationships between civil society and the government are cordial and cooperative and constructive as the city begins to become feral and it can become feral it can move toward ferrari in several these categories or one of these categories but it gets to the point where eventually there is no security unless you provide your own either through your own means or through association with other entities civil society is fracturing services are at a minimum if at all available so you have to kind of fend for yourself there is little legitimate business that was a surprise I'll talk about that and at best when in terms of government you have negotiated zones of control and we're actually seeing that more and more and at worse there simply is no central government or local government that's rare if never actually happens all right so governance my first but I should have been very clear my first disclaimer everything I'm going to talk about is my opinion my and not any way reflective of that of the United States government the Department of Defense Department of the Navy the Naval War College or any other group I may or now or have been or will be associated with and a second disclaimer for this time at this slide transparency international has their new figures for 2020 they have not yet published in an available form their corruption map so this is the corruption map of 2019 that I have altered to say 2020 because the important rankings it's almost the same there's some movement up and down inside the categories and as soon as the new charts come out I'll be plugging them in the United States people I just want to know how do we stand and the answer is not as well as we used to last year we were down one spot and now we are down two additional so we're not moving in the right direction and it was interesting because the main reason we slipped had to do with financial transactions security transparency etc. Somalia and Sudan again remained tied for last place at 179 economy when I first began studying this phenomenon on Farrell cities my assumption was and it seemed to be backed up that what economy would exist would be a legal and subsistence and for a while that looked like that was true for example in Mogadishu other African cities but Mogadishu was a great example when the cotton supply shows up in the morning cotton is a mild narcotic which is chewed for the most part the cotton market opens up people buy their drugs and the rest of the day is pretty well shot and then it happens again the next day there are also at the time there are significant open arms markets there's a collie of mine who actually has a scale he judges the danger of a city by the price of a hand grenade and at its worst Mogadishu sold hand grenades for five dollars a pop so you can imagine how bad that was the boy with the shark again subsistence you catch a fish in the in the morning you try to sell it to the locals and the price goes down as the sun gets hotter and the fish gets riper what i didn't expect to be honest was that there are some high-tech industries that operate out of cities that are approaching ferrilli one of them is telecommunications the old days which we measured progress by miles of copper wire to support telephones are gone with a tower in a satellite dish you can have communications in fact some companies who provide communications in these areas find it relatively liberating because rules of air of bandwidth and frequencies and all the controls we normally associate with this aren't present and the the amount of actual hardware they risk losing is minimal and there's money to be made other things surprise me you the university of Mogadishu Mogadishu you operate today and has been all along now it's a pretty harsh way to teach you occasionally have to duck at the worst of times when gunfire would come through the walls but it's it's fascinating that the urge for education still is powerful enough to drive people's behavior and a while back bbc did a piece on family living in Mogadishu at the worst of times the mom had lost a foot and she was she was making sure her kids kept going to school now they were madrasas they were taught by islamic moms but that the need to educate is on perhaps baked into us services in a great city there are all kinds of services besides health and sanitation and transportation and security there's also parks and recreation places that there are arboreums and museums in a feral city no you're not going to get that and it's going to get worse and worse as you come more and more feral this is Mumbai city Mumbai and the slum of darlai which has about as a last count that would get 850,000 people living in it's the world's largest slum and services are an issue sanitation hospital etc and that has had an impact or that issue has been greatly impacted or it's contributed to the impact of COVID-19 which we'll talk about within many of these areas and this is again darabai a great Indian city services are provided by a variety of actors many of which are non-governmental and many of which are humanitarian and nature and these are just some nazio is basically education and job opportunity looking for handicapped people the toy effing dash the foundation speaks for itself Neptune is an attempt to get mentally distressed people off the streets into his own safety there's a lawyer's collection child help the foundation is highly rated the number one NGO in Mumbai sorry Darbhai today is humanitarian aid international and so there's a great variety but it does raise a question now the Indian government allows permits and encourages these NGOs to operate within the city of the slum city of Darbhai but when you think about it these organizations are performing functions that the government normally would there's a kind of a social contract and in the United States we expect there to be medical services available that water will be cleaned for drinking etc these organizations do this instead of the Indian government there are in Darbhai there are people's courts which have been empowered by the Indian government but are extra judicial in terms of the normal governmental apparatus and so you know locals are basically adjudicating cases that's another example where you can say people are really resilient and they find ways to work around problems or you can say this is another case where the government cannot provide services that most states would expect to be given to its city dwellers and somebody else some other entity is picking up the slack now in some cities as we'll see that provision of those services medical power etc are performed by criminal organizations and that changes the dynamic of the city extensively in terms of how do people feel about their governor other than their government this is Lagos Lagos is an exciting bustling city with the dark with a long and rich history it also is one of the largest cities in the world and it is growing exponentially it grows so fast that I would argue nobody knows exactly how big Lagos is because it grows so fast we take a satellite picture you can kind of map in the outlines and get square footage but within that number there are places where people truly the zones of ecological devastation so grim that people can't live there the mayor certainly doesn't know at any given minute how big it is and the same is true of population you can make a guess you can make an educated guess and you'll probably be ballpark but it's not like Portsmouth where you can pretty well assure that it's one of your tracking births of the hospital and deaths you know how many people live in Portsmouth there are real environmental issues from the city of the size now there are some security concerns for years Lagos was known as the capital of internet scam so if you were ever contacted by Princess Lamoco saying if you send me $15,000 I will split the 4.5 billion my dad's stash in her mattress and I'm still waiting but I'm sure that it's just a matter of time so she'll pony up her half of the deal and the more reality of this though is that unfortunately many people age seniors in the United States etc. preyed upon my favorite named gang that did this was the Yahoo Yahoo boys and rather an assaulting aside cyber criminals internet criminals in Lagos are very dismissive of people in the United States and their ability not to be scammed it's almost as if you're going to start somebody on this track of on this career path you begin with U.S. citizens because they're easy if you're really good at it you scam the French and there have been times when from citizens have actually reversed scammed the scammers so I don't know if we should feel good about being you know trusting or if we should feel bad about being cyber chumps but there you have it security and I put the premise into parties because in the different categories I begin to think that security is number one without a secure environment it's very hard to provide the rest of the services that go with it although certainly governance and security go hand in hand a corrupt ruling society or corrupt ruling system of the city does not tend to produce good security and perhaps vice versa this is Johannesburg the Johannesburg is up here because it was my inspiration for this this now a decades more path of exploration I was in Joburg in 2000 I was attending a conference and it was an amazing experience the central business district was more deserted and populated it was like something out of Blade Runner and I couldn't tell for a long time if it was just because Joburg was becoming an African city with a lot of black population or if it really was kind of in the grips of something different and a few things told me that it was different the number one is the stock exchange that's the national the national stock exchange in lower right in 2000 the South African government moved their national stock exchange from Joburg to Stanton a suburb about 20 miles away that's the equivalent of the U.S. or New York moving the New York stock exchange from Wall Street to Rye New York and the reason they did was because stock brokers were no longer safe the security of the institution and its personnel were so compromised that the government decided that it would be better to move the facility that's a fairly big red flag about the ability to control a city I just recent checking the new issue in South Africa crime has always been an issue and the South Africans have strobe mildly to get a handle on this now this is not any way to disparage their efforts but it's a it's an uphill battle and in some cases it's the remnants of apartheid and political in fighting but the the new thing is kind of odd these there's been huge spikes in raging xenophobia and the the comment you hear is crime in South Africa it's all because of those migrants migrants from where Mozambique Zimbabwe any of the neighboring villages now that's not true certainly there are crimes associated with migrating people but there's a lot of indigenous crime in South Africa perhaps much more than there is being brought over the border but as a result of this kind of idea we're seeing xenophobic crowds beatings assaults that does not make things easier for the city of Jobore or the state of South Africa high jackings are still rampant in Johannesburg I thought certainly in 21 years there would have been a an improvement still pretty dangerous truck jackings is also a big area business robberies of business have gone up not so much others there there's good news in other places murders are down it's still an excessive rate and then home invasions are down another perhaps another symptom two of them one is seven arrows seven arrows is a security company and if you have the ran you have the money seven arrows will do everything from the squirt your family to and from school and work they'll protect your house it's like ADT we see it here on steroids and that includes everything from covering your trip and rescuing you for getting trouble it's a it's a remarkable phenomenon but it's it's again waited for the rich and it's become it's become an entrepreneurial opportunity in a niche that should have been filled by the state and it's I think another example where central states and central governments are losing control of some of their cities part of the issue may be that Jobore is at the heart it's very hard to find a chief of police who sticks the course this is Liz Angie McWazie she's been the chief of police since March and hopefully everybody wishes her well but she's still acting which is a little odd because we think right now she would be not much I'm sorry about three scale she would be confirmed but the last two chiefs that I know have been acting chiefs the whole time and that's because of political infighting at the higher levels of government in the city okay um oops there we go and in the 2020 list for the most deadly cities the most or dangerous cities that man I think there's a there's a difference this out the thing you'll notice right away is that they're all in South America this has been a tendency for the last several years if you expand the list to 50 or 100 it becomes more diverse but and it will within South America three countries hold one two and three and that's Venezuela Mexico and Brazil Brazil hasn't had an issue for a while and we'll talk why about that Mexico it's almost all cartel and drug related and Venezuela is what happens when a state really begins to go toward failure and systems begin to implode upon each other and then when people have no food they tend to resort to other measures to get it etc and I'm I put that as strictly as a result of state failure okay so I talked about how if you expand the list you get more diversity and you actually pick up three cities in Africa all of which are in South Africa for now you also see why South America and the Caribbean are right up there it's not just those first 10 Mexico technically is in North America and so they provide the majority of North American cities this one this again 2019 Los Cabos was the number one city but now it's Tijuana they just gave it away but four cities in the United States have remained on the list they've been there for the last three years st. Louis Baltimore Detroit and New Orleans and the most dangerous of these is st. Louis which is interesting Baltimore has always been a hard city my beloved New Orleans in which I consider myself at least I graduated in New Orleans my family's from Louisiana my mom's side so I've always thought of it's kind of my city a ruthless child has fixed their city and it's it is grim it's always been a hard city it's up to you to be careful but it makes the top four and I can't really talk to Detroit and st. Louis perhaps somebody else can in terms of why they may remain on the list but that's there none is there are none in Asia okay so Tijuana right now is number one not a distinction that you'd want to have most of it is because of violence and it's almost all related to gang slash cartel drug violence cartels are still fighting over turf the fighting has turned brutal and deadly there is actually a patron saint of narcos now excuse me a witness has come with glamorization of the drug life we see it in the TV show weeds and some of the music that's coming out of Mexico and some of the other areas this violence is spreading to the United States one of the the most dangerous cities in top 50 was no way well so it was yeah no way well orado and that's on the Mexican side of the border but drug violence is now moving into the United States this is in part because drug lords seeking safer environments moved over the border and violence has followed in the past just to do a quick run by last year Los Cabos Mexico at that wonderful resort town was number one and it was drugs Caracas had it for 2018 and that's related to the Venezuela meltdown as I think of it and on 2017 it was San Pedro Sula of the Honduras and that was drugs again now just because you're on the list doesn't mean you can't have a wonderful life in that city I know people in joe board for example there's one guy who blogs does look at our Cape Towns another one these are wonderful cities you just have to be smart you know they're having been a resident of Miami for several years there's some truth to that visitors who complain about getting robbed you feel bad about things that wouldn't this happen it was 2 a.m where did this happen an unlit alley going to the beach it's like oh okay you're really stupid and then there's another one where it's a classic crime in Miami I left I left my expensive watch my really expensive watch and my sneaker when I went into the water into the ocean and when I came back the watch was gone it was like well yeah now you're tempting honest people with that but the crime we're talking about in this case goes far beyond targets of opportunity and this is almost always organized violence again Venezuela may be a special case and that's kind of common all right so when I'm talking about cities and you're talking about security and I'm still on a security kick for a while part of it is weapons availability depending where you are it may be cheaper to buy an ak-47 than it is to buy next month's groceries it is highly complex human terrain not only are there divisions of ethnicity and background history neighborhoods family but there is also economic strata mobility issues etc and so if you don't really know that city it's very easy to make mistakes and perhaps some of you who have experienced with old cities you know perhaps an example is Boston trying to discern which criminal gang controlled what part of the city and etc in the in the old days now that white he's gone it's tough it's also demanding physical terrain part of my research in this problem into how do you fight in the cities and the answer is not very easily city combat sucks up infantry and armor that causes more psychological damage and combat different in different environments which is again surprising defenders have an advantage because they know the city when you knock down a building you simply create more places to hide and you can think of perhaps the in the italian campaign of world war two when we knock the the monastery that wants a casino down germans just hit in the rubble so that's tough and then there's a real question about how much training and how well was it received that you give security forces that are trying to maintain law and order these are afghan police and i have not asked this year but in the past they were not rated especially highly the afghan army was rated much more highly and the problems with corruption and lack of diligence and a whole slew of things that go with it poorly perhaps a poorly trained and or this case of training didn't take the poorly paid police force and we'll talk i'm talking about the warlands a little bit and the same thing applied to the warlands okay when law enforcement fails people seek alternatives uh in this case militias this is a city of lebanon of militias were long a part of the urban terrain well armed criminal gangs and we see that more and more and even in mexico where the police are heavily armed uh from time to time the cartel membership simply out shoots them with better and heavier weapons and more in mexico later private security forces much like seven arrows are on the rise and what police remains becomes militarized they stop looking like the cop on the beat and they look like swat there's another issue of that is that cops become another gang and sometimes the numbers can be astonishing mexico city has more than 90 000 policemen that's more people under arms than canada has soldiers and there are still mexican senators who say the police are as much of a problem as are the gangs i'm not going there i'm not that familiar with the internal workings of huyanada mexico's law enforcement but it is not you don't have necessarily feel safe when a traffic cop comes up to you well that's probably true in the united states as well if you're in mexico city all right this is brazil brazil is a special case one i'm kind of fond of back in 2005 the pcc the primario commandant of capital so it's a gang now viewed as a terrorist organization their leaders were in jail and the resilience were going to move into high security segregated separated cells and from jail with the legal cell phones etc they ordered their gangs to go to war in saupado more than 500 buses were burned the the local police were fought to a standstill and in the end there was a negotiated settlement that's pretty bad when you think on it also in brazil you have the the issue of power theft electricity is tapped illegally from city-provided conduits and is sent into favelas this is of course the brazilian slum not just in saupado but in rio and other major cities you have lots and lots of informal housing which is interesting you may remember that prasilia was designed to be a model city and it was and is to some degree pardon me but informal settlements have grown up around it and as a result the the the ability of law enforcement to extend into those favelas many which are controlled by criminal gangs has been severely limited in the past the brazilians have even resorted to using their military to conduct what amounts to assaults and raids into their own city's territory they can be successful for a time but when they pull out incomes the the criminal or the gang restores its leadership a friend of mine is a providence foreign council relation foreign council of foreign relations talked about his daughter when i gave this lecture he was very surprised and said but rick my daughter goes to rio every year and she works in a clinic and nothing bad ever happens to her i said well that's great now where's the clinic and it was in los alamos now one of the worst favelas i said well why do you think no one's ever minister threatened or much less harmed your daughter and so well that's simple the cartel that owns that favela would never let anything like that happen to her and so i can look and say well you just made my point and the reason why the favelas do that of course is they are seen as providing medical care to the people of that area and in terms of are you a doctor or are you simply somebody else if you fix my abuela's foot or cure my my dad's glaucoma you're a doctor particularly when nobody else is interested in fixing you now brazil this is new and it's i think it's it's really scary uh in addition to the police now we're seeing local arm militia groups contest gang membership and ownership of different parts of the territory the map uh red is criminal uh the figure with the green as it's also criminal but it's a different different group but blue are these militia units so you get a really interesting dynamic and by the way militia units that start off as we're of the people for the people by the people they're now collecting protection money they are threatening shop owners if they don't cooperate they will pay a price and so as we saw in for example came to him with a group called pegas people against gangsters and the drugs pegas started out as a vigilante force that was going to work for the locals and became quickly became yet another criminal organization of extorting the locals to keep them in business the question of environmental health in cities has long been an issue in some places this is compounded perhaps as in india where animals are allowed to roam free the ability of when i first came up with this idea by the way there are people said this is a wonderful idea for our cities where you have animal and city farming and ranching and chicken growing it's great true if you have the veterinary services the medical checkups the proper way of disposing of waste etc if you're not it simply adds to the petri dish which is a city and this is these pictures go back to SARS many people lost their livelihood in South Asia when entire ducks your entire if you own ducks your entire duck population was taken up and killed to prevent the spread of SARS the woman up right look she's losing her livelihood and she may be losing what amounts to pets this is really grim the young man on the boat is collecting trash that he can be he can resell a salvage and that's a river he's in so interesting dichotomy here you have the 10 most polluted cities this has not changed very much one in india i'm sorry one two in pakistan one in china and the rest are in india and it's everything from what kind of generator power how do you handle street pickup etc and then there's the unhealthy cities and this was done by a a tourist company and the criteria are very different and this stands as a reminder to watch your surveys and make sure you know what they're talking about because for example um yes mexico city is unhealthy but so is new york and washington dc and london and saapado in paris um and what they looked at among other things were you know how many other city dwellers are obese and what your life expectancy the happiness level which is an interesting way of they have an interesting way of determining that how much does a gym membership cost if it's too expensive nope you know how many people work out basically how many hours of sunshine do you get which is interesting as you think you'd see a lot of you know worst of anger and where's oslo and a lot of the stock but that perhaps that's often by average offset by average hours worked and outdoor activities so that's a you well you can get a list of 10 worst it's a very different list than what 10 cities top the scale and killing people or most polluted as soon as you know some of these do correlate with the list okay to teowana the environmental thing this is a great little example the teowana river for years and years and years was a well regulated little waterway and then teowana exploded in size lots of irregular settlements went up and the number of people in teowana exceeded the city's ability to handle its sewage particularly when heavy rainstorm swept through so the picture in the upper left is a fecal bloom lovely word and the current runs south to north so all that yuck gets carried into california as a navy brat growing up in coronado on the beaches there when you start talking about shutting beaches in south california that's worse than shutting beaches in new wiliam for shark attack so the the people the good people in san diego and others the first effort was we'll scoop this up and we'll send it back to mexico well you can imagine how poorly that worked and instead they have been supporting with money etc building more chemical plants more sewage plants in mexico property in the teowana area they still get overwhelmed and have these storms but it certainly helped and it's an example of a transnational threat pollution does not always abide by boundaries and requires cooperation as opposed to confrontation sometimes to fix um global warming is indeed an issue i won't bore you with how much land can be lost these are the four continents that if you have a major rise in water what happens you see that florida disappears etc but basically um the food security is minister migration increases people tend to leave farms for cities that migration puts more pressure on cities that are already under heavy pressure and then you have food shortages and other things to go with it it makes a bad situation worse almost to the end civil society all right and this is one this is a category i added because the great mystery was all these cities kept being on the list over and over again they were gonna fail they're gonna go feral and yet they didn't quite do that and then i think the difference was civil society that glue that holds us together how strong is it it also was has a way of making the making the unthinkable okay there was a great decline from a person who lived in johannesburg for a year and he said in south africa people get used to conditions that would be unacceptable anywhere else so i think you see that and what makes civil society well the upper two are actually NGOs for peace they're protesting violence or they want to have helped victims of battles and the johannesburg one that stopped nuclear development of power in south africa clearly religion is a piece of civil society we see that in islamic societies but this is the pope visiting brazil where he influences a lot of people facebook twitter snapchat barley all can produce civil societies there was a study that said the game world of warcraft if that was a country it'd be the fifth largest country in the world and it's certainly true that those of you who belong to certain groups may feel more kin with members of your groups in india or japan or the west coast then you do with your neighbor three houses down and then we civil society is not always positive the boko haram al shabab and this day isis were elements of a society that bounded together much like a civil society not for a purpose we would consider productive uh in the united states today this was this was a this was a good year or a bad year for city studies uh the rise of antifa and just what they are but they're clearly a presence now in the political scene in the united states but also far right wing extremists so the fbi now identified as the number one source of domestic terrorism in the united states now this one this slide is dedicated to the brugulu boys who are white racist irredentist who want to do away with the u.s. government replace it with a kind of a white society um these are not good developments cobin maintenance cobin 19 was just breaking out last year and when i started looking at this and we have some interesting what what will it do what will the effect be and the answer is it makes everything harder um it puts more pressure on green cities it puts a lot more pressure on those that are at the bottom of the scale um and as structures break down the movement begins to move toward for rally not toward a better city the cities have become epicenters of the disease and the adverse effects fall not surprisingly most heavily upon the poor that's what the u.n concluded this year as you know their cities some example in the northern triangle of uh south america where most of the refugee flows are originating from social services and medical services have been overwhelmed by cobin and which again more pressure on people more impetus to move and get out in nigeria um hunger they tried to lock down and be and do the safe medical thing but because the food distribution was a problem and food resources were a problem people were driven out of their homes to find something to eat and there are also issues with transportation if you don't have a private car you've got to ride the bus that means you're exposed to more people if you shut down bus lines and you've got to walk further or take your bicycle further i guess one positive indicator it has been an uptick in bicycle sales and use and then and thereby poor sanitation made this issue worse not perhaps surprising all right um cobin is linked to demonstrations which may be peaceful but also may become violent this is global a global map of cobin 19 demonstrations and the ones that are are orange were accompanied by violence as a couple in the united states most of them obviously were in india south america and other places oh by the way if you notice that canada looks great or ocean it's just because there was no data from them when the united states again a little more little more granularity orange in this case is not political violence it's the protests were due to issues regarding whether or not schools would reopen and in the united states obviously and listen to develop world that was a really a surprise at least to me that when you take children out of school not only do you disrupt their education which probably can be made up but you know if you have a two-income family now has to deal with the child at home either your child has to take care of itself or you've got to bring in some form of supervision or you have to stay at home which cuts into your so we're not immune to that i'll come back to political violence in a second uh hurricane katrina my city uh in the aftermath of katrina the the city of new Orleans the state of louisiana the united states could not extend the rule of law into the vir correct it was underwater uh and so my city became feral for about five days and then the water receded and control was re-established the repair has been phenomenal united states has a lot of resiliency so power comes back on there was a mardi gras that year which is important if you're from the world but one of the sad things is they didn't they lack the political will to repair the levees to a level that was required and as a result it's only a matter of a decade or so before another storm of the century hammers the levees of new Orleans but because to to take the levees from withstanding a forced and cattle caracan to a force five hurricane would require displacing people changing neighborhoods which are those issues are fraught with political issues and so it just wasn't done all right black lives matter erupted this summer for the most part this summer still continues as a source of of severe consternation it was not us it was us on our worst not our under best and this is just an example of where black lives matter related demonstrations riots etc took place so political violence over these issues is not is not different we were i think any normal us citizen was sickened and dismayed by the cases of mr floyd of his tailor etc but it it again it tore at the political fabric of the country but also at the political fabric of major cities look at how many cities now have black lives matter and huge letters on some of their main thoroughfares and the reaction that that brought which brings me to seattle again if you'd ask me when i started this you're going to see a u.s city that goes far out man to me no absolutely not there's too much redundancy there's too much governance there's too much of all the good stuff and i miss katrina because i didn't think about could this happen as a natural result and the answer is sure so if the yellow stone caldera blows if california gets the big one you could easily see ferrari but this i did not see and seattle's capitol hill autonomous zone which changed its name to the capitol hill occupied protest zone and that was done because those who were in charge felt it was becoming too much of a carnival and they wanted to remind people it was a serious reaction to relate to black lives matter and that there was more of a sit-in or an occupation that it was a party and as a result the the city government of seattle did not intrude into the zone there were two shootings there was some violence some store members thought it was good others asked for police help eventually the barriers came down and police occupied but this is what has me really thinking now about that next category in the diagnosis and that's where's the political will and i say that because there were other zones everyone knows about portland right portland's being with the red house jazz it started 8 december that came down in 14 december so it wasn't that long but there was negotiations there were apologies in this case they didn't have that kind of woodstock feeling from the beginning there were booby traps there were supposed to be weapons in the red house that goes back to an eviction notice um so that's another case where the city chose not to to utilize the forces it had to restore its its sovereignty over that territory and you can talk about that might have been the right thing to do because if you're a city leader you have to balance consequence the cost of life if you take it over by storm what happens after that but you also have to then balance that against the continuing lack of your ability to grow up in part of your city in washington dc there was going to be a black house occupied zone and then in this case an autonomous zone it was right across the white house um it went up at night on 22 june and it was gone by the next day because dc police simply came in on this man looked if you're looking for a historical precedent you might remember the bonus marchers in dc in 1922 these men who were demanding early payment of bonds from world war one mostly they were veterans um establish a shanty town in anacostia the u.s. government and the capital kind of i would say dithered as to what to do until after an election in which case they sent the army into demolition that kind of that operation was run by Douglas macArthur and his chief of staff or at least his adjutant Dwight eisenhower and george patin was in tanks and they flattened now in the philadelphia there was a i'm sorry yeah that in philadelphia there's going to be an autonomous zone for the NGO care not cops it lasted less than an hour but i don't want to forget 6 january 2021 um whatever you call it a pooch a riot gone bad i'm sorry a demonstration turned into a riot an occupation and insurrection and i think there are elements of all of those things um it is something i thought i would never see in my lifetime and an angry mob technically armed breaking into the congress the senate uh just uh you know the very halls of power and yes uh back in the fifties i'm sorry the forties a quarter weekend nationals managed to insert themselves into congress and shot up the chamber but at least they were terrorists these are these are u.s citizens um and so you get that whole shocking uh device and so this is my kind of my open question right now uh these are a new category that should be put in and that is what is the political will of the city's leadership and dealing with challenges to its sovereignty or its ability to provide services or its ability to to um create healthy bonds with civil society and they're they're willing this to clean up their own active in terms of governance and i'm thinking that might be another important indicator along the way and with that thank you for listening to my fire hose of information i welcome your questions although i don't promise to do a good job at answering but i'll try my best and i'll stop sharing now and john over to you uh thank you very much uh rick never a happy presentation no sorry so uh you've answered an awful lot of questions as you went through your remarks here but let me put a couple unique ones out here uh one observer asked is there any connection between colonialism and feral cities in africa absolutely but that's a much larger issue there's a connection between colonialism and almost everything that's going not right on the african continent when you abandon a country after holding control of it for a century as the portuguese did mozambique and you leave it with five phds and three mds and a few lawyers you're setting things up for failure if you look at the congo uh there are issues there and it's certainly been argued that the way africa was divided into the modern state uh split tribal units and demographic groups and been far more intelligent to do it differently however i would point out that when the oAU was founded african leaders who had an opportunity to withdraw to redraw the map chose not to um now you can't blame everything that happens in african colonialism africans have agency it's been in many cases even though the most recent cases of independence we're now going past the half-century mark but sure colonialism did make it harder uh on african so to that degree yes by the way if there's any students out there my colonial wars class electorate and my uh wars of our independent selectives are available uh two out of the three semesters in the year and we'd love to see you there thanks john i appreciate the commercial but that's a great question should i mention my robot class no probably oh sure no no probably no we don't want to get this into a a city a city of a city of robots would not be farrell anyway very much uh interesting question is there any gender component to farrell cities is there any connection between female leadership and whether or not a city might be a farrell city that's a genius question and my quick answer is i don't know my follow-on answer is i want to know more um you've got um acting chief mokazi and jobury uh you certainly have uh seen in african for example more women coming to senior leader like mr sirleaf in liberia um i would also say the indicators i would look at for that and i think it's a really good idea and i think it's a really good question if you look at women peace and security which does focus more on termination of war and military issues security issues and which no chance to plug the college which i think one of the wellsprings is right here um but women peace and security when you involve women and peace negotiations a conflict resolution the conflicts last 30 on the average 35 longer than without them it brings an entirely different point of view and so i think uh my guess is this is i have been wrong many times that the as women become more included in city leadership etc that you may see more peaceful resolutions of these issues uh seattle for example had a woman mayor uh there was a very vocal women member of uh their uh their house of representatives that that cautioned against the use of force and so you know you can make up you can have a lot of opinions on and was that the right thing to do or not but i would point out that it ended peacefully it wasn't it didn't require you know shooting mass shootings or anything like that or mass violence so i my sense is the answer is probably yes but i don't have anything to back that up other than the women peace and security which has gone beyond it's an interesting idea to this is actual this is as actuarial as somebody assessing your ability for life insurance so we're all interested in what's going on and uh close to home there've been another number of comments here about uh baltimore and st louis and other other issues this question is how much of a threat to the us do we believe exists from feral cities in mexico oh um i was gonna say in the u.s that's a great that's a good question um i think we're clearly seeing issues and the expansion of violence and illegal activity over the border um i think if mexico and it can't be too harsh on the mexicans the mexicans have been the mexicans have been at war with cartels for 10 years they've lost the equivalent of multiple army divisions and they're fighting this war with their military right now um and it's understandable that if you're the mayor of the small town in the northern tier of mexico and the cartel rows up and they show you pictures of your children they go well mr mayor you can either be mayor and look the other way or you won't be mayor and we'll kill your family so there is some tremendous pressure on mexican leadership um but having said that we are seeing spillover and by the way if mexico loses this war if the north goes if it becomes a uh if it becomes a for lack of a better terms uh a knocker of cartelacy you know with basically a criminal uh criminal country that's going to be bad for us if mexico melts down people who think there's an immigration problem now now you're going to see millions on the move and so i think the potential is really high i think right now it's contained along the border but that's no longer quite the case isn't it when you're talking about things like mara sabatucha 13 their gangs they're active up in the northern tier of the united states and big cities locally so is it is it an existential threat to the united states probably not is it something that complicates our law enforcement it could grow to be much worse than it is sure and i think this is why you have to cooperate with mexico it's a transnational issue um you have to be sensitive to mexican issues from their point of view and so uh it's a great question and it's one that bears watching thank you uh uh question on the impact that uh migrants refugees illegal refugees etc may have in turning an area into a feral city uh what could the international community do perhaps to be more welcoming more accepting more integrative of these groups of people coming into a country well there are several things right um if you can keep internally displaced people and by the way this is not my major area expertise my infinitely smarter and a beautiful wife family that's kind of her area but um if you can perhaps uh in the countries of origin provide services there you might be able to whether it's a safe haven or whatever you might be able to stop the flow you can increase services in the receiving countries um but it's it's a hard challenge i'm not i'm not saying it's not because someone's going to have to pay for it you're going to have to try to and there's some really interesting demographic issues you've seen this in africa sometimes people live better in a refugee camp than they do in the surrounding environment and that causes resentment for those people who don't get those kind of facilities um by the way i'm not i'm not suggesting that life in a refugee camp is wonderful it's not club med or anything like that um so you have those issues but i was going to say funny because i went a different way um i thought it was going to be the classic migration refugee population the u.s personal opinion united states has only benefited from refugees and migratory flows while there are always disruptions whether it's the irish the itaians the germans mexicans the country as a whole has benefited and now if you're talking about cities that gets interesting um i lived in miami for for um abrasive years it was after the Haitian migration but if you look at that although the gdp in the united states did this it didn't budge um certainly the local politics demographics issues in the city of miami changed mildly between the cuban migration and the Haitian migrations that we saw post-castro and then later on when the aris d was trying to return the power so locally you could have much more disruptive effects than you can internet i think the united states as a nation that's i can do john several of the uh the observers today have suggested it may be a category of something like resilience might be a good thing to add to your matrix uh the degree to which a city or a nation can respond to whatever challenges it faces that's a really smart comment um i have certainly looked at resilience as a potential category right now i'm looking at is an amalgam of governance services uh everything else that goes with it but it could warrant its own and we see that by the way international uh when a major earthquake hits the city in afghanistan or um in the middle east it takes years decades sometimes to recover similar damage in us cities are handled much more rapidly now it's interesting because um we're pampered and there are studies that suggest that if you don't get your lights turned on even it's after a classified hurricane which is like the brillo pad of god scouring you know wide swath of the territory if we don't get our lights turned on by in 48 hours we begin to blame the government for being unresponsive um that's a pretty if it's looking at a hurricane andrew or kentrina that's a pretty hard standard to meet and i think the reason or or a major snowfall up in doing that personally i think we're a little overboard with super storms but in the case of a really violent hurricane level in our easter you know maybe giving the authorities more than two days to get the tv back on is a little harsh but um we do we do expect resiliency out of our people and our and our leadership and for the most part we are and again new warlands i had i had friends from the north who you know were basically comforting me saying you'll get a mardi gras next year and i said oh no no share we're gonna have a mardi gras this year and we did it was kind of truncated but that's just the spirit of new warlands no nothing for the song but you know i had no doubt they might not have running water but new warlands would have a mardi gras so i think there are these elements of u.s culture that we we are more resilient in some way and i think for the most part disasters brings out a really good side of us but um as for in terms of resiliency as a category it's still on the possibility but you gotta be careful otherwise i'm gonna have a chart that's five by a hundred but i'm really so right now political will is the leading contender but resiliency has been in that in that stack well the last question and since you brought it up is there going to be a mardi gras this year oh yeah absolutely and how how is the city going to handle okay poorly i think all depends where the vaccinations are all right and i i suspect the city will handle it poorly because um it's one thing to where not to get together as a as a political statement the mardi gras is baked into the dna of louisiana if i get i've been wrong all right so maybe my former neighbors and all that will not be silly or risky if we packed if we packed the football stadium for the super bowl my fellow nor linians will come out for the bra so um and it's just really hard to imagine they would so hopefully the vaccinations are going into place and it'll be a joyous celebration as opposed to let's roll the dice and see if it's a super spread right now all right sir well is there any final wrap up comments you'd like to make rick no it's uh just that this is a moving target i would once again i have been wrong in my predictions before so don't take them to the bank or more especially don't take them to the stock exchange um i encourage everybody to kind of watch this i do think it's one of the emerging issues of the 21st century and i'd like to thank the foundation the admiral and my institution for being willing to be part of this and i think it's kind of neat that of all the places one of the places that we do research on for our cities is here at the naval work homes so i wish everybody a good day and good luck and thanks very much for listening to me thank you very much doctor excellent presentation admiral did you have any comments as we wrap things up here before we shift to a family discussion group well that was a really great lecture a lot of new terminology for us and a way of thinking about things that maybe we haven't always thought about in the past and so i just want to thank professor norton and uh and all of the great comments that came in uh to tell us how you're thinking about this new material uh so thank you very much for tuning in to this issues and national security affairs lecture series and we hope that we'll see you again thank you now we'll take about a five minute pause here and then we'll come back for our family discussion group meeting so five minutes and then we'll be back with you thank you