Neighbourhoods Mobilise the Troops - Community Organising, Violence and Governmentality

The article reflects on the difficult relation between community work against domestic violence and local crime prevention under the conditions of the neoliberal state that cuts down on social benefits and promotes self-help, active citizenship and self-responsibility instead while at the same time restoring the punishing state with its strict regime of law-and-order. The author describes a project Tarantula - she started herself while being a social worker in Hamburg, Germany. Tarantula was aimed at strengthening social networks and the neighbours' willingness to get involved in favour of affected women. Although conceptualized as an emancipatory approach referring to community organizing in the tradition of social movements it is questionable whether and how this can really work in the current situation. At present, the field of crime control is being reconfigured as a result of political and administrative decisions, which, for their part, are based on a new structure of social relations and cultural attitudes. The demolition of the 'welfare state' means the re-coding of the security policy that facilitates the development of interventionist techniques that govern and control individuals through their own ability to act.

De-Territorialization and Re-Territorialization of “the social”. A debate

Deterritorialization has been used as an anthropological concept to designate the weakened ties between culture and place: Certain cultural/social processes and relations seem to increasingly transcend their previously given territorial boundaries in flexible capitalist societies. At the same time, policy studies, especially Studies on Governmentality, have emphasized the re-territorialization of the social, in which the former national welfare arrangements (welfare and nation state) as the scale of bio-political integration patterns are more and more substituted by small scaled inclusion areas (e.g. neighbourhoods, districts and communities). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, de-territorialization processes have therefore always to be understood as combined with processes of a re-territorialization, producing new spatial formations. In this view, spatial arrangements and connections are not given and static structures, but controversial and unstable – nevertheless they are influential.

Governing the Local? A Response to Kevin Stenson

Kevin Stenson’s article offers a powerful argument for examining governmentality in particular local configurations rather than as relatively abstract and text-centred studies of changing mentalities and rationalities of rule. I think this is an important endeavour, partly because more situated analyses of governmentality are necessary to enrich the analytical (and political) significance of the perspective; and partly because the view from governmentality has a capacity to enrich our understandings of governance, policy and practice. Kevin’s own discussion of community safety in the Thames Valley area demonstrates just how much such a situated analysis might add to an understanding of liberal rule in England in the 21st century. Let me highlight four points that I think are absolutely central to that analysis:

A Critical Response to Kevin Stenson’s Governing the Local: Sovereignty, Social Governance and Community Safety

In his compelling case study of local governance and community safety in the UK Thames Valley, Kevin Stenson makes several important contributions to the field of governmentality studies. While the paper’s merits are far-reaching, to this reader’s assessment they can be summarized in the following key areas: 1) Empirically, the article enhances our knowledge of the political economic transformation of a region otherwise overlooked in social science research ; 2) Conceptually, Stenson offers several theoretical and analytical refrains that, while becoming increasingly commonplace, are nonetheless still germane and rightly oriented to offer push back against otherwise totalizing, reified accounts of roll back/roll out neoliberalism. A welcomed new approach is offered as a corrective, The Realist Governmentality perspective, which emphasizes the interrelated and co-constitutive nature of politics, local culture, and habitus in processes related to the restructuring of social governance; 3) Methodologically, the paper makes a pitch for the ways in which finely grained, nuanced, mixed-method/ethnographic analyses have the potential to further problematize and recast a field of governmentality studies far too often dominated by discursive and textual approaches.

Beyond Kantianism - Response to Critiques

I am flattered and privileged to have received four such astute critiques of my work from an international cast. I will reflect at length about many of their points in future work but to respond fully would require a very long article and so I will highlight some of the more salient issues. The authors share misgivings about my commitment to a realist version of governmentality theory so I will try to articulate a bit more clearly how it is different from two major alternative perspectives highlighted by the authors: what I term a `discursive` governmentality perspective (Stenson 2005), and the neo-Marxist regulationist school of political economy. However, deeper normative questions are raised, for example by Wendy Larner, about what it means to be progressive or critical within the broad terrain of liberalism (which can include neo-liberals and neo-conservatives) in the wake of the collapse of communism and much of the power of western labour movements, the rise of the new emancipatory and environmental social movements and varieties of religious fundamentalism. As social scientists and university intellectuals we usually argue that our work differs from journalistic reportage or ideological polemics that gather supportive evidence through selective fact gathering. This is because we dig beneath the flux of events and surface appearances and debates to uncover the deeper structures of thought and social relations that shape our experiences and the flow of events. And we also engage with contrary evidence that troubles our truth claims. This is the work of theory. I accept that theory plays a vital role but argue for a more grounded approach rooted in empirical research using a variety of methods and data sources. Hence I adopt a more cautious approach to conceptions of the `deeper structures` we uncover. At best we can only know them through provisional heuristic modelling and it is best not to reify them.