Studying Cities at War

The Destruction of Knowledge Infrastructures
and Exclusions 

Julia Strutz and Zena Asswad, about the trouble to write about Cities at War and the publication of lectures by the scholars involved in the lecture series.

War in cities coincides with the destruction of knowledge. During our 14-week lecture series, Cities at War, which took place between October 2025 and February 2026, this destruction became evident both at the personal level and as an institutional reality. One of the co-organizers of this academic endeavor, Rojava University, experienced the looting of its close partner institution, Al-Sharq University. Its already limited educational facilities were turned into refugee shelters, while many students joined the general mobilization. The American University of Beirut, home to the Beirut Urban Lab and another co-organizer of the series, was forced to suspend activities because of the US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon.

Throughout the lecture series, we continued to meet regularly while scholars involved fled Gaza, feared the resumption of violence in Yemen, had to leave their homes in Beirut and Qamishlo, tried to address imminent genocidal attacks in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, struggled to stay warm amid the weaponization of electricity infrastructure during a harsh Ukrainian winter and endured the most severe internet censorship in history. Many of the cities we discussed in the series were shelled, experienced armed conflict or feared the resumption of it.

The lecture series witnessed not only cities destruction but also cases of epistemicide, the deliberate elimination of knowledge systems that sustain urban life. War does not only interrupt academic work; it targets the infrastructures that make knowledge possible, from archives and libraries to digital repositories and communication networks.

Scholars were not only documenting violence; they were living through it. The emotional labour of conducting research while protecting families, navigating censorship, or surviving bombardment became inseparable from the intellectual labour of analysis. Academic networks transformed into systems of collective care, sustaining researchers who were otherwise isolated or endangered.

Despite all this, and despite the profound anxiety that war produces for those both near and far, researchers of cities at war continue their valuable work for their cities and communities. Yet, the destruction of knowledge in cities at war and the systematic exclusions it implies for researchers needs to be addressed directly. 

War and the regimes that perpetuate it systematically erase memories of peace that existed before violence. Often taking archives as booty, the war parties pave the way for new regimes to rewrite the past, ensuring that all traces of war crimes are erased by destroying archives, libraries and museums while creating new ones (Cox 2012, Auer 2017). All scholars involved in the Cities at War lecture series deal with the destruction of their data and sources, whether that be physical archives or online repositories of primary sources, which are often even more easily targeted, the death or forced displacement of research subjects or colleagues and the sheer materiality of urban space. In this group of researchers, nobody’s cities constitute a „field“ that they visit regularly, but they are homes. As livelong inhabitants, scholars, activists or employees in these cities, primary sources and data are closely entangled with these researchers. Some of the researchers involved in the lecture series possess base maps that they created through meticulous efforts often spanning years. Yet these maps cannot be used by the same researchers, as governments dissolve, regimes change, companies are defunded or change hands, and researchers become targeted. Former archive employees see their labour literally deleted in times of war. Often they try to save what they can, continue to collect despite being persecuted and forced into exile (Moustafa 2020).

Archivists are addressing this systematic destruction of knowledge infrastructures as “displaced archives” defined as “removed from the context of their creation and where the ownership of the records is disputed.”(Lowry 2019, p.350)To save them from complete destruction, displaced archives often have to be kept secret and cannot be freely accessed and referenced by everyone, which makes them “in the literal sense of the word, useless material for anybody other than their holders” (Auer 2017, p. 123).

So even if researchers continue their work despite all odds, how can they deal with the systematic destruction of knowledge from a research ethics perspective? How can you adhere to the standards of transparency and replicability when you cannot quote a source or conduct an analysis because you cannot refer to it, even though it is sitting right there on your hard drive that you managed to save?

From the researcher’s perspective, research ethics then become a mechanism of exclusion, an obstacle to publishing in a recognized way. Critical Archival Studies is unraveling the epistemic injustice involved in displaced archives and develops norms how to deal with this (Caswell et al 2017). Should researchers in cities at war publish primary sources as an appendix to articles? Or reference archives that are no longer/currently publicly available? Or do they decide not to touch upon this subject too vigorously and leave it to the readers to read between the lines?

In this context, the work of the Beirut Urban Lab becomes all the more important. Their relentless efforts to use the city as an archive for future collective (un-)archiving contribute to recovery and create multi-voiced, multi-form materials. They enable communities in Beirut’s Karantina neighbourhood to recover from the Beirut Port Blast and municipalities in Gaza to reimagine the future amidst urbicide. However, while the Lab was rolling out and conceptualising their most recent archiving intervention in Nabatiyeh, South Lebanon, for this specific locality, the city and the researchers themselves were hit by another war.

All lectures highlighted that reconstruction after war is never neutral; it is a struggle over epistemic power, where the right of communities to define, preserve, and narrate their own histories collides with the authority of external actors. International NGOs, foreign universities, diaspora institutions, and private investors often arrive with funding and visibility, positioning themselves as custodians of knowledge even when local scholars hold deeper expertise and lived experience. This dynamic reduces local researchers to “informants” rather than authors, creating hierarchies of legitimacy. At the same time, reconstruction is not only about rebuilding what was destroyed but also about rebuilding destruction itself—deciding which ruins matter, which traces of violence remain visible, and which are erased. Some ruins are preserved as memorials, others demolished to signal progress, while still others are rebuilt in ways that overwrite the memory of violence or left abandoned as markers of neglect. These choices determine whose trauma enters the official narrative, whose losses are acknowledged, which neighbourhoods are prioritized, and which communities are permanently displaced. In this sense, reconstruction becomes a form of memory governance, shaping how future generations will understand both the war and its aftermath.

This is the context in which the lecture series took place and the conditions under which researchers prepared their presentations and a written version of them. We are proud to share with you eleven texts that derived from the lectures: