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.

Guest Editorial: Racial and Ethnic Conflict and Violence

Racial and ethnic violence takes many forms. Genocides, ethnic cleansing, pogroms, civil wars, and violent separatist movements are the most obvious and extreme expressions, but less organized violence such as rioting, and hate crimes by individuals or small groups are products of racial and ethnic conflict as well. Also, the distribution of criminal violence within societies, which may or may not be aimed at members of another group, is in some places a by-product of ongoing conflicts between superior and subordinated racial or ethnic groups. Although estimates of the number of deaths attributable to ethnic violence vary widely, range of eleven to twenty million given for the period between 1945 and the early 1990s show the gravity of this type of conflict (Williams 1994, 50). So it comes as no surprise that scholars have paid increasing attention to such conflicts over the last decades.