Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia

Less than a year after the end of authoritarian rule in 1998, huge images of Jesus Christ and other Christian scenes proliferated on walls and billboards around a provincial town in eastern Indonesia where conflict had arisen between Muslims and Christians. A manifestation of the extreme perception that emerged amid uncertainty and the challenge to seeing brought on by urban warfare, the street paintings erected by Protestant motorbike-taxi drivers signaled a radical departure from the aniconic tradition of the old colonial church, a desire to be seen and recognized by political authorities from Jakarta to the UN and European Union, an aim to reinstate the Christian look of a city in the face of the country’s widespread islamicization, and an opening to a more intimate relationship to the divine through the bringing-into-vision of the Christian god. Stridently assertive, these affectively charged mediations of religion, masculinity, Christian privilege and subjectivity are among the myriad ephemera of war, from rumors, graffiti, incendiary pamphlets, and Video CDs, to Peace Provocateur text-messages and children’s reconciliation drawings. Orphaned Landscapes theorizes the production of monumental street art and other visual media as part of a wider work on appearance in which ordinary people, wittingly or unwittingly, refigure the aesthetic forms and sensory environment of their urban surroundings. The book offers a rich, nuanced account of a place in crisis, while also showing how the work on appearance, far from epiphenomenal, is inherent to sociopolitical change. Whether considering the emergence and disappearance of street art or the atmospherics and fog of war, Spyer demonstrates the importance of an attunement to elusive, ephemeral phenomena for their palpable and varying effects in the world. Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

The SYSTEM IDENTIFICATION OF FRIEND AND ENEMY USING NIGHT VISION CAMERA ON BATTLE ROBOT (CQB) USING PATTERN RECOGNITION METHOD

– Indonesian Army has the main task of protecting against enemy attacks, which include forest battles as well as urban battles. The obstacle faced today is that in the process of urban warfare operations, infiltration and hostage rescue in buildings are still less efficient and optimal. The robot is designed with a system that can identify friends and foes using a Night Vision camera and the Pattern Recognition method. Pattern recognition is a symbolic grouping automatically that is done by a computer to find out objects or patterns. The results of the Night vision camera test are able to detect human objects with a maximum distance of 6 meters. This night vision scope has a fairly large accuracy rate of 83%. And light intensity has an influence on the identification process because if the light intensity is more than 200 lux then the system is not able to identify the object.

Urban Warfare

Urban warfare refers to combat occurring in a built environment of some significant size. It is sometimes referred to as Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) or as Fighting in Built Up Areas (FIBUA). It is widely considered to be particularly challenging. Partly this is because of the inherent complexity of the built environment, which taxes the ability of commanders to apprehend the battlespace, to lead their own forces effectively, and to judge the location and intent of enemy forces accurately. Partly it is because of the presence of civilians and sensitive civilian infrastructure (i.e., places of worship, hospitals, museums, etc.) in the battlespace, which limits the choice of tactics and weapons available to commanders for fear of violating laws of armed conflict. Partly it is because cities are nodes in global networks of trade and communications, as a result of which the consequences of tactical decisions may propagate widely and quickly to significant strategic effect. Sun Tzu advised fighting in cities only if “absolutely necessary, as a last resort,” a rule to which statesmen and commanders have tried to adhere to this day. However, on account of long-term trends in demographics, urbanization, and connectedness the major armed forces of the world have been preoccupied with a postulated unavoidability of urban warfare. Military doctrines and strategies often now start from the assumption that the future of land operations will increasingly be centered on urban terrain. The literature on urban warfare is quite segmented by discipline, normative outlook, particular areas of concern, and some fundamental points of disagreement. Researchers in urban studies detect in the growing military focus on operating in cities a “new military urbanism” that is by nature neo-colonialist, xenophobic, and “anti-urban.” The job of activist scholarship, in this view, is to expose and confront this development. In war and strategic studies, by contrast, scholars are interested in solving the challenges of urban warfare, including through the use of theories derived from disciplines like urban studies, anthropology, geography, and informatics. There is a further division between analysts who see urban warfare as an essentially modern phenomenon whose meaningful history stretches not much further back than the Second World War, and those who see war and the city as interlinked with relevant lessons going back as far as the origins of both.

HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT WITH OR WITHOUT PORTABLE ARMAMENT ‒ FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS FOR THE TRAINING OF THE MODERN MILITARY

Despite technological advances, hand-to-hand combat with or without portable armament remains a necessity in the contemporary operating environment, especially given the ambiguity of urban warfare and the close and regular interaction of the military with various adversaries (combatants or non-combatants) a wide range of situations in which force is used. Being a commitment between two or more people, in a confrontation in which ammunition is not used; training the military on hand-to-hand combat seems an important component that the military must consider in the physical preparation of the military for future conflicts. Cultivating courage to increase self-confidence is one of the most important benefits that hand-to-hand combat training can have. In a tense situation, having trained fighting skills in this regard can mean the difference between opening fire and escalating conflict, on the one hand, and avoiding disputes through a self-control approach to the factors that cause pain and fear, on the other hand. Keywords: hand-to-hand combat; portable weapons; technical procedures; specific training; physical training, military physical education.

On urban studies in Brazil: The favela, uneven urbanisation and beyond

This essay discusses some key ideas and debates about urban studies in Brazil, considered historiographically, from the mid-1900s to the present. It presents the main components and particularities of what emerges as the Brazilian matrix of urban studies, interrogating the most influential work in the field with the country’s own experiences of industrialisation and urbanisation. It discusses some key urban debates of the 21st century, namely new planning models associated with globalisation, global mega-events, public–private partnerships, inner-city gentrification, housing and city financialisation, rising forms of urban warfare and social control in slums (favelas), and new activisms and urban insurgencies. Through this analysis, we point to contradictions and tensions in relation to European and North American urban theory, calling for the need to formulate new categories and hypotheses to better understand the unequal and extreme processes resulting from violent expansion of capitalist relations over the entire planet, and comment on the new practices and forms of social mobilisation emerging from turbulent contexts.