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.