Contributions to
the Cities at War Lecture Series

Written versions of the lectures are published online and available through open access.

War destroys cities, and with them, the knowledge they embody. Too often, research investigating cities at war disregards the harm incurred by scholarly communities and their eventual dispersion and even erasure. The online lecture series “Cities at War” approached scholars, the context of their work, and the lives they endure with the effects of violence as an integral whole, hoping to provide a modest opportunity to express solidarity, maintain research, and contribute to rebuilding academic communities.

The Cities at War seminar series ran for 16 weeks starting in October 15th, 2025 and was  fully online and publicly accessible. As a grantee of the Urban Studies Foundation’s Seminar Series Award, it was co-organized by the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut, a research collective pioneering the collective and interdisciplinary study of cities at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, the Department for Social Sciences HU Berlin, Department of Social Sciences as the accrediting partner, Off University, a self-organization of scholars at risk, University of Rojava, and Diyarbakır Association for the Protection of Cultural and Natural Assets .

We are proud to present the contributions of the lecturers on our off.pubpub instance. PubPub makes them not only accessible online for free, but also gives the reader the opportunity to interact with the content. If you wish to leave a comment to the articles, just create an account here.

In the order of appearance in the lecture series: