Matt Bowden

Powers, liabilities and expertise in community safety: Comparative lessons for ‘urban security’ from the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

This paper begins by outlining and critiquing what we term the dominant anglophone model of neo-liberal community safety and crime prevention. As an alternative to this influential but flawed model, a comparative analysis is provided of the different constitutional-legal settlements in each of the five jurisdictions across the UK and the Republic of Ireland (ROI), and their uneven institutionalization of community safety. In the light of this it is argued that the nature of the anglophone community safety enterprise is actually subject to significant variation. Summarizing the contours of this variation facilitates our articulation of some core dimensions of community safety. Then, making use of Colebatch’s (2002) deconstruction of policy activity into categories of authority and expertise, and Brunsson’s (2002) distinction between policy talk, decisions and action, we put forward a way of understanding policy activity that avoids the twin dangers of ‘false particularism’ and ‘false universalism’ (Edwards and Hughes, 2005); that indicates a path for further empirical enquiry to assess the ‘reality’ of policy convergence; and that enables the engagement of researchers with normative questions about where community safety should be heading.

Youth, Governance and the City: Towards a Critical Urban Sociology of Youth Crime and Disorder Prevention

This article considers the historical and spatial context for the emergence of youth crime and disorder prevention initiatives in Ireland. These initiatives have to be understood in the context of their relationship to the broader ‘urban question’ and in particular the relationship of the peripheral housing estate to the rest of society and the economic sphere. More recent changes in the nature of society and the emergence of a ‘liberal creed’ have resulted in greater use of surveillance technologies for offsetting the opportunities for crime to be committed. In this context, youth crime prevention initiatives must be seen as an extension of an ensemble of devices for governing young people’s behaviour. The rise of fortified locales in cities serves to reinforce exclusivity and to mask the working class and marginalized from the elite and vice versa. The paper suggests that the challenge is to create an active public sphere for young people.

Youth Work as a Public Good: Older Teenagers’ Experiences of Youth Services in Dublin

In the context of consumerism, individualism and the privatisation of young people’s leisure, youth work struggles to attract young people, especially those aged 15 to 19 years. Drawing from a study exploring young people’s perspectives on participation in youth services, it is argued that youth work offers a type of public and civic engagement that is not on offer from consumption-based activities. While certain activities attract young people into youth work, what maintains their participation is the sense of belonging they experience and the opportunity to participate meaningfully in decision making. In this regard the youth work sector needs to recognise and promote the value of its own contribution to the construction and maintenance of youth participation as a public good – something the market cannot or will not provide.

Crime, Disorder and Symbolic Violence

To close this study of the governance of crime and disorder in the urban periphery, this final chapter brings together key observations from the research with the Bourdieusian-inspired analysis underpinning it. This monograph might be viewed as partly an urban sociology and partly a critical realist criminology. Underlying much of what has preceded this chapter is the idea of territoriality — a socio-spatiality concerned with how the state, as a power container, penetrates space and, once accomplished, how it governs subjects through symbolic space. This organizing conceptualization has been enriched by Bourdieu’s field analysis, which enables the empirical study of social relations in spatial locations and the struggles for capital in that arena. The connection between physical space, social space and symbolic space is a problematic one in Bourdieu’s work, but in more recent years some scholars have sought to explore and rehabilitate Bourdieu as an urban sociologist.1 Savage’s (2011) analysis of Bourdieu’s ‘lost urban sociology’ points us towards the way in which actors are situated in space. Bourdieu’s earlier work was concerned with the spatial fixity of poor farmers, and, in later developments of his field analysis, social relations were seen as having a spatiality; therefore, their agency and their power struggles are ‘marked in the urban landscape itself’.

Two Models in Action: Symbolic Violence versus Ethico-Craft

This chapter presents an analysis of findings from an ethnographic participant observation study in two sites. The study examined the nature of interactions between youth crime prevention practitioners and young people in urban peripheral settings during 2004 and 2005. The purpose of the observational study was to deepen the theoretical case by exploring the governance of the subject through practices at the face-to-face level. Achieving a closer position to the action was required to engage with the question of symbolic violence. The purpose of under-taking participant observation fieldwork was to explore the nature of the youth crime and disorder prevention curriculum. The starting assumption here was that, if states mobilize crime prevention to moralize, regulate and govern, then some systematic investigation of whether these processes exist was necessary. Some writers, most specifically those of the neo-Foucauldian tradition (Rose, 1999, 2001; Rose and Miller, 1992), assume that governing involves the mobilization of subtle processes of self-regulation and hence is part of an ‘ethico-politics’. Thus, at some point, values and beliefs held by governors must be exchanged with the governed.

The Dublin Urban Periphery 1960–2008: A Political Economy

This chapter contextualizes the urban periphery in Ireland, with particular focus on Dublin, as a precursor to the case studies in chapters 4–6. The detail presented here identifies the historic, social and spatial specifics in which youth crime and disorder prevention modalities emerged. The chapter draws primarily from the Irish urban studies literature, together with an analysis of the report of the Interdepartmental Group on Urban Crime and Disorder (IGUCD) (Government of Ireland, 1993).

Symbolic Power and the Crisis of Territoriality: Urban Disorder in the 1990s

This chapter analyses the dynamics of state–civil society relationships following the outbreak of disorder in Ronanstown and further explores these relationships as part of an ‘urban process’ (Harvey, 1997). This is the first of a series of linked theoretical case studies: the studies explore how the key actors governed crime and disorder in peripheral settings through symbolic violence. The study reveals a series of ‘calls to order’ (Bourdieu, 1977), where representations of state power were mobilized as a way of ensuring the right response from the subject, or appeals to the habitus. What are specifically explored here are accounts by actors of the situation as they found it and of their symbolic struggle to restore order. These accounts reveal the nature of governance in networks of personal and professional relationships that centred on the ordering of territory.

Symbolic Power in Three Peripheral Settings

The chapter examines practice in three settings in greater detail: Ballynew and Leevale-Campanile Hill (LCH), both in Dublin, and Emmetstown in Regional City, a provincial centre in the south of the country. This is organized into of four key sections. The first involves the motivations and rationale of state, police and civil society actors for setting in place youth crime and disorder prevention initiatives. The issues under consideration here relate to whether and how actors worked to govern the territory through cultural domination, seen in actions such as the promotion of police visibility. In this sense, the chapter considers the degree of institutional accommodation between agencies or networks of actors. The second section probes more deeply into the forms of curriculum and pedagogy mobilized at the level of practice. Those that were reflexive are distinguished from those that appear to underpin a form of social panoptic governance. The third section considers the organizational forms and actions of actors in the three sites, focusing especially on Emmetstown and LCH. The section outlines the shape of networks based upon informants’ accounts of their activities. Finally, the chapter gives some consideration to the issue of non-instrumental, discursive communication between young people in the peripheral estates and the police through the intermediaries in youth services, and pays particular attention to practices in the Pinevale Project in the Dublin peripheral suburb of LCH.

A Bourdieusian Perspective: Governing Territory and Subjects

In the previous chapter the empirical data presented gave us an insight into the state’s actions following urban disorder in the Dublin suburbs in the early 1990s. These disorders were significant for a number of reasons, but primacy must be given to the idea that these very suburbs were centred upon a planning and economic optimism born in the 1950s and 1960s. It will be argued later that the symbolic impact of the disorders was a significant moment for the Irish state. At centre stage here is symbolism and social order — the meaning that is to be derived by observers and the actions taken to bring social and moral forces back into equilibrium. The question, then, becomes one of how these ‘disorderly’ or indeed ‘ungovernable’ territories are governed; whether through coercive or persuasive state strategies or combinations of both.

Urban Disorder and Symbolic Violence: Opening the Case

Four themes are central to the perspective developed in this book. The first is that urban disorder stimulates scholarly and political attention to the conditions producing disorder. For example, the urban riots of the 1980s in British cities served as backdrop to the formation of Left Realism (Lea and Young, 1984). Equally, Rob Reiner’s (2010) historical sociology draws our attention to the disorderly conditions which gave rise to the police as a uniquely modern institution. Often the policy developments tend to be half-baked efforts to restore social order. The second theme is that of the preventive turn — the term used by Hughes (2007) to capture the shift from the locus of crime control within the criminal justice system and its dispersal to a wider range of actors. The third theme is the socio-spatial formation of the urban periphery as a distinctly recent and geo-historically specific context: it is here that the manifestations of the preventive turn crystallize as a result of urban disorder. The fourth key theme in the book is that of the governance of the subject (Garland, 1997). This concerns the basis upon which subjects are governed or are engaged in what Nikolas Rose (1999) referred to as an ‘ethico-politics’ in which the subject is incentivized to self-govern as the state withdraws from welfare. Critical here, however, is how this engagement might be understood — either as an all-embracing set of governing rationalities and technologies for governing the soul, or as an area of uneven development in which the state is a player in a field of contest for the domination of territory and the subject.