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more difficult security challenges of the new century’ and ‘may prove as common a feature of the global landscape of the first decade of the twenty-first century as the faltering, failing, or failed state was in the last decade of the twentieth’.46

By the middle of the century, more than half of the world’s population will be living in large conurbations, many of which will have more than ten million inhabitants. Some cities or neighbourhoods have already become semiautonomous enclaves, whose inhabitants lack jobs, adequate housing and the most basic services. A number of these cities are either badly policed or not policed at all and some have effectively fallen outside the control of the state. In Brazil in 2006, armed gangs calling themselves the First Capital Command staged a semi-uprising in Sao Paulo in support of the treatment of their members in Brazilian jails and staged some 250 separate armed attacks in a single weekend that reduced much of the city to chaos. In Mexico in recent years, the death toll in violence between heavily-armed drug gangs has reached wartime levels and prompted the intervention of the Mexican army.

Given these developments, it is not impossible to imagine that some of the elements in Norton’s dystopia might occur. But what is striking about the military dystopian imagination is not just the dark future that it conjures up but the assumptions that underpin its conclusions. The Oxford Dictionary defines ‘feral’ as ‘wild, untamed, uncultivated, brutal’. All these adjectives describe the violent and diseased populations of Norton’s feral cities. Like mutant creations of H. P. Lovecraft crossed with extras from Black Hawk Down, they have regressed to a pre-modern state of nature that no longer responds to anything but military force. In effect, Norton’s depictions of the feral city recall an older dichotomy between civilisation and barbarism, cleanliness and defilement, law and disorder that has often been replayed in western depictions of the wider world and which can still be found in the writings of Military Operations On Urban Terrain (MOUT) specialists, with their references to the ‘dark places’, ‘cesspools’, ‘dense urban jungles’ where US soldiers will fight the ‘hybrid wars’ of the future.

On the one hand ‘explosive urbanisation’ is a problem that can only be solved by military ‘intervention’ on a global scale. At the same time, these toxic urban environments are perceived as obstacles to US military supremacy. In a prizewinning essay for the Marine Corps essay contest, Major Kelly P. Southgate laid out the dilemma:

By 2020, 85 per cent of the world’s inhabitants will be crowded into coastal cities – cities generally lacking the infrastructure required to support their burgeoning populations. … Likely US enemies include a wide array of possibilities: al Qaeda terrorists; dictatorial strongmen; drug cartels; or perhaps tribal/ethnic strife leading to humanitarian crises. These potential adversaries realize that fighting high-tech U.S. forces in open terrain is suicidal, and thus enemies will tend to operate in cities and towns, attempting to use the urban terrain to neutralize U.S. technology.47