Fragile city: transposing fragility from international to national level in urban security

Paraušić Marinković Ana (Institut za kriminološka i sociološka istraživanja, Beograd), parausicana@gmail.com
Lipovac Milan (Fakultet bezbednosti Univerziteta u Beogradu), milanlipovac@gmail.com

The concept of the Fragile city represents a more recent and increasingly significant notion within the study of security, owing both to its pronounced association with the strength of the nation-state and its potential for opening new theoretical, empirical, and practical dilemmas within the scholarly disciplines of International Relations and Security Studies. While initially situated within the context of international and national security, the Fragile city increasingly becomes a framework for the examination of urban security. Therefore, the aim of this paper is directed towards assessing the sustainability of the idea of Fragile cities as an independent theoretical concept, which is relatively independent from the concept of weakness/fragility of the nation-state. In this paper, the authors provide an overview and critically analyze existing definitions of Fragile cities, determining three ways in which fragility is related to cities: 1) cities within the context of fragile/weak states; 2) fragile cities within fragile/weak states; and 3) fragility of developed cities. Towards the end of the paper, the authors present potential directions for future consideration, as well as possible avenues for the application of the concept of Fragile cities in future (urban) security research.

Keywords: national and international security, fragile/weak state, urban security, fragile city