Governing the Local: Sovereignty, Social Governance and Community Safety

There has been much commentary about the re-ordering of the relations between nation state government, geographical territory, and populations in the advanced liberal democracies. This is seen as a product of: increasing demographic and cultural diversity due to legal and illegal migration; economic, cultural, and political global interdependence; footloose mobility of capital and the outsourcing of jobs to poorer countries; the growing power of international corporations and financial markets; and the growth of supra-national bodies like the European Union and The North Atlantic Free Trade Association, the World Trade Organisation, and (debatably), the UN. These developments are held to be associated with the gradual demise of the model of the increasingly secular nation state first crystallised by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This conception provided a mutual, guarantee of states’ jurisdiction over territory and populations through their legitimated attempts to monopolise the use of force. Though, the relations between these states have always been asymmetrical and often challenged (Hunter 1998).