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.

The Effects of Living in Segregated vs. Mixed Areas in Northern Ireland: A Simultaneous Analysis of Contact and Threat Effects in the Context of Micro-Level Neighbourhoods

This study examines the consequences of living in segregated and mixed neighbourhoods on ingroup bias and offensive action tendencies, taking into consideration the role of intergroup experiences and perceived threat. Using adult data from a cross-sectional survey in Belfast, Northern Ireland, we tested a model that examined the relationship between living in segregated (N = 396) and mixed (N = 562) neighbourhoods and positive contact, exposure to violence, perceived threat and outgroup orientations. Our results show that living in mixed neighbourhoods was associated with lower ingroup bias and reduced offensive action tendencies. These effects were partially mediated by positive contact. However, our analysis also shows that respondents living in mixed neighbourhoods report higher exposure to political violence and higher perceived threat to physical safety. These findings demonstrate the importance of examining both social experience and threat perceptions when testing the relationship between social environment and prejudice.

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.

How Insecurity impacts on school attendance and school drop out among urban slum children in Nairobi

This paper discusses how perceptions of personal security can impact on school enrolment and attendance. It mainly focuses on threats to physical harm, crime, community and domestic violence. These security fears can include insecurity that children suffer from as they go to school, maybe through the use of unsafe routes; insecurity that children feel at school; and the insecurity they suffer from in their homes. Although poverty is an indicator of insecurity, this paper does not focus solely on poverty as it is well covered elsewhere in the literature. The paper relies on qualitative data collected in Korogocho and Viwandani slum areas in Nairobi, Kenya between October and November 2004. The paper analyses data from individual interviews and focus group interviews and focuses on the narrative of slum dwellers on how insecurity impacts on educational attainment. The conclusion in this paper is that insecure neighbourhoods may have a negative impact on schooling. As a result policies that address insecurity in slum neighbourhoods can also improve school attendance and performance.