Pathways

Recommendations

Developing recommendations relied on deep listening, reflexivity, and centering affected individual and community voices—the same principles required for future action.

Guiding principles

These are the guiding principles that informed our recommendations to transform urban spaces and prevent IBMV.

1. Address process as well as outcomes.
   Process recommendations must include participatory, inclusive, and intersectional methods, while outcome recommendations must be evidence-based, data-driven, and locally tailored. Focusing on process is crucial. Transformative change requires that legal and policy decision-making engage in consensus-building methods in which individuals collaborate on developing solutions together.
2. Apply rights-based, trauma-informed, and survivor-centered approaches at the individual, collective, and societal levels.
   These approaches protect human rights; focus on state obligations and accountability to all people within its borders; address trauma in affected communities, including across generations; place the well-being of victims-survivors at the center of violence prevention; and help develop solutions to address and prevent individual harms, collective harms, and wider, social harms.
3. (Re)build trust, relationships, and community while respecting and integrating varied forms of expression and knowledge.
   Policymakers must understand their own roles in—and wrongful benefits from—structures and institutions that perpetuate discrimination and violence against certain identity groups in cities. These structures and institutions must be remade away from the hierarchical domination and subjugation of certain identity groups over others, to a place of valuing collective ways of being, centering new forms of knowledge and expertise.
4. Engage a multitude of actors operating across diverse sectors.
   Stakeholders must understand the pathways of structural and acute violence—and these pathways’ influence within the urban ecosystem—toward developing methods and action items to respond in preventative and transformative ways.
5. Lean into deep understanding and community building across related fields of study.
   Professional areas of study are siloed, but through cross-pollination and deep listening, an extraordinary amount of insight, knowledge, and collective action can be achieved. The combination of identity-based discrimination and mass violence is a complex social, economic, political, legal, environmental, and structural problem that requires a multidisciplinary, field-building approach.
6. Pursue transformative change by focusing on both acute and structural forms of violence.
   To prevent IBMV, policies, programs, plans, and practices must address immediate harms at the same time as they tackle the underlying drivers and root causes of identity-based discrimination and mass violence in urban spaces.

Practical areas of action

While every chapter provides suggestions or insights for action, the editors dedicated one chapter to policy recommendations that can and should be taken. All the recommendations are informed by the guiding principles that form their foundation. Specific recommendations include:

1. Reframing narratives.
   The stories that are told about violence inform the sets of solutions that are applied. It is essential to unpack and reframe harmful narratives.
2. Shifting policy orientations.
   It is of urgent priority to frame responses around rights. Individual and collective rights are eroding and the solution is not to essentialize core needs, but rather to have a rights-based vision of humanity.
3. Focus on urban conflict.
   There is more conflict in the world today than any time since WWII. Wars increasingly target civilians and involve a range of state, quasi-state, and nonstate actors. There is a need to disambiguate how IBMV precedes conflict, is core to war making, and is pursued in the wake of conflict.
4. Institutional localization.
   Better appreciating the mosaics of power and disempowerment is key to ensuring that efforts to localize do not end up reinforcing the very abuse and discrimination that is creating and reinforcing disposable communities.
5. Invest in dialogue.
   Knowledge is power. The way that knowledge is kept (or gate-kept) and used can cause both harm and benefit. This volume argues in substance and in style for an equality of voices and perspectives.
6. Rethink funding priorities.
   Equity-oriented funding strategies are essential, alongside an ethos that demands rights for all, regardless of identity or status.
7. Invest in community.
   Invest in organizations that work to protect human rights defenders, journalists, academics, political prisoners, and all those who are being persecuted for their beliefs, their opposition to political elites, or their identities.
8. Training and capacity building.
   Those who analyze social patterns—whether in legal, transportation, education, healthcare, or other systems—must have the capacity to understand protective mechanisms people engage when they have experienced real structural harm.