Coastal Cities – Future Conflicts
A lecture by Dr David Kilcullen, President and Chief Executive Officer, Caerus Associates.
Dr Kilcullen explores how climate change, urban overstretch and rural-to-urban migration has the potential to trigger conflict and to create crises in health, governance and public safety.
It took all of human history, until 1960, for the planet to reach a total of three billion people. In the next thirty years, roughly the same number of people will be added to the global population, virtually all of them in cities and on coastlines in the developing world. Coastal cities in Africa, South and East Asia and Latin America will experience urban overstretch, while dramatically enhanced connectivity will allow problems in one area to spread rapidly to the whole globe. Combined with the effects of climate change, urban overstretch and rural-to-urban migration, there is the potential to trigger conflict (both within cities and in the broader world system) and to create crises in health, governance and public safety.
In his lecture, Dr Kilcullen explores all these issues, drawing on extracts from his recent book 'Out of the Mountains', and on fieldwork he and his team conducted in war zones and conflict-affected cities across the world (including Mogadishu, Tripoli, Baghdad, Kandahar, Cairo, Kingston Jamaica, Mumbai, Karachi and Kabul) over the past three years.
Dr David Kilcullen is President and Chief Executive Officer of Caerus Associates, a strategy and design firm that helps governments, global organisations, businesses and local communities build resiliency in complex and conflict-affected environments. Before founding Caerus, he served twenty four years as a soldier, diplomat and policy adviser for the Australian and United States governments. He was Special Adviser to the Secretary of State in 2007-2009 and Senior Adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007. He has provided advice at the highest levels of the Bush and Obama administrations, and has worked in peace and stability operations, humanitarian relief and counterinsurgency environments in the Asia-Pacific, Middle East, South Asia and Africa. He is a well-known author, teacher and consultant, advising the US and allied governments, international organisations, NGOs and the private sector. His bestselling books, 'The Accidental Guerrilla' and 'Counterinsurgency' are used worldwide by civilian government officials, policymakers, military and development professionals working in unstable and insecure environments. He holds a PhD in the politics of insurgency from the University of New South Wales, Australia., please click here for further information.