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.