Conflict in Cities and the Contested State

Abstract

Several articles in this issue of the Jerusalem Quarterly are devoted to an examination of the nature of Jerusalem as a divided city. It is based on the work of a five-year British research project entitled Conflict in Cities and the Contested State based in the Universities of Cambridge, Exeter and Queen's University, Belfast. 1 The project does not look at any or every kind of divided city. The focus of the project are those cities which are divided as a result of ethno-national and religious conflict and, in particular, those cities that are in conflict due to the contestation over the legitimacy of the state in which they are located. Conflict in Bradford, for example, would not be included in our study since the legitimacy of the state is not contested in that part of the UK. But Belfast is part of the project since the legitimacy of the British state in Northern Ireland has been contested by Irish republicans. The project focuses on such divided cities in Europe and the Middle East and in particular, Belfast and Jerusalem where we have two multidisciplinary teams of researchers and research partners. The teams comprise of political scientists, geographers, architects and urbanists, sociologists and political anthropologists and we bring our different conceptual frameworks and research methodologies to bear on the subject. We also have researchers in Berlin (where we are interested in the legacy of division) Brussels (which is being held together through various consociational devices) Mostar (where the role of EU and UN intervention is critical) Nicosia (the