Class, Ethnicity and State in the Making of Urban Marginality

Abstract

This chapter draws an analytic map of the research programme pursued across my three books Urban Outcasts (2008), Punishing the Poor (2009) and Deadly Symbiosis (forthcoming). In this trilogy, I disentangle the triangular nexus of class fragmentation, ethnic division and state-crafting in the polarizing city at the century’s turn to explain the political production, socio-spatial distribution and punitive management of marginality through the wedding of disciplinary social policy and neutralizing criminal justice. I signpost how I deployed key notions from Pierre Bourdieu to clarify categories left hazy and to forge new concepts (territorial stigmatization and advanced marginality, punitive containment and liberal paternalism, hyperincarceration and negative sociodicy) as tools for the comparative sociology of the unfinished genesis of the post-industrial precariat, the penal regulation of poverty in the age of diffusing social insecurity and the building of the neo-liberal Leviathan. Bringing the study of the contemporary permutations of class, race and immigration, and the state, into a single framework shows how the racialization, penalization and depoliticization of the urban turbulences associated with advanced marginality reinforce one another in Western Europe as in the United States.