Crime, Disorder and Symbolic Violence

Governing the Urban Periphery

M. Bowden

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137330369
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This timely book provides a theoretical and empirical engagement with contemporary understandings of the governance of crime, safety and security. Using a Bourdieuian framework, Bowden explores concepts such as capital, habitus and symbolic power to present an analytic tool-kit for a critically engaged public criminology.

Part I

Introduction

1

Urban Disorder and Symbolic Violence: Opening the Case

Criminology and urban disorder

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.

This book aims to discuss the case of governing the urban periphery in Ireland and, in the process, to develop a Bourdieusian perspective – that the urban periphery is a locus for everyday field struggles for power and domination. Actors are involved in a competitive struggle for the power to dominate. That power, according to Bourdieu (1991), is the right to wield symbolic rather than physical violence. Symbolic violence has to do with a long-run investment in penetrating territory with a common understanding and has the power to dominate subjects through more subtle and durable forms of power than otherwise achievable by physical force.

Urban disorders have a tendency to ignite media and political moral panic, but they also stimulate scholarly interest: partly because they crystallize the structural conditions and major social transformations of the time, whether it is the end of Fordism or the advanced individualism and consumerism of post-modern society. Writing about the ‘post-political’ riots in London in the summer of 2011, Treadwell et al. (2012) point out that those on the margins were unable to find an object for their dissatisfaction and ‘turned to the shops’ (Winlow and Hall, 2012). Disorders stimulate reflections, not least in criminology. Another example of this is the prolific Loïc Wacquant (1993b, 1996, 1999, 2001), who, during the 1990s, published a series of articles and papers on the nature of urban marginality and urban disorder in both France and the US. At the beginning of one such article, Wacquant (1993b) describes the scene of the urban disorders at Vaulx-en-Velin, a working-class area on the periphery of Lyon. A local teenager was killed in a motorbike accident caused by a police car: the catalytic moment for three nights of rioting, the dispatching of riot troops by the French government and the burning of 200 cars. The impact on government could not be underestimated, as the ‘long-simmering rage of the banlieu – declining peripheral areas with high densities of degraded public housing – tops the political agenda and will dominate public debate for months on end’ (Wacquant, 1993b, p. 3).

Wacquant linked these disorders to the emergence of a ‘new poverty’ that had accompanied the end of the mid-century consensus and the emergence of post-Fordism (Wacquant, 1996). The Vaulx-en-Velin story was not an isolated incident: Wacquant (1993b) linked this with the extensive urban disorders in Los Angeles following the acquittal of police officers for the videotaped beating of Rodney King.¹ In the previous decade, Margaret Thatcher had waged war against the ‘enemy within’, including the striking coal miners and print workers, and cities across the UK experienced outbreaks of urban disorder (Scraton, 1987). Disorders are catalytic in a number of ways, not least that they produce developments in criminology.

My own introduction to criminology began in 1991 after bearing witness to the urban disorders at Ronanstown, a residential area on Dublin’s western periphery which was planned as part of the ‘new town’ developments in the 1960s and built in the late 1970s. My primary interest in this book is to analyse urban disorder and the state strategies that emerged as encapsulating a type of governing. In doing so, one must engage in the narrative and political economy of the city, the relational field of state and urban politics, and the forging of, as Foucault (1977) would have put it, technologies for the governance of the soul.

The empirical material for this book is drawn from the case of the Republic of Ireland – a country of four million people which up until the 1970s was a largely rural, agricultural, post-colonial society and economy. Rapid urbanization followed the industrial strategy inaugurated after the Programme for Economic Progress (1959), which shifted economic policy from an import substitution model of industrialization to one favouring foreign direct investment. Apart from occasional political rioting associated with republican politics, riots were rather diminutive in scale compared with those in English cities during the 1980s. Yet they did occur, and warrant attention in this first chapter.² There are two goals in this scene setting: first, to provide an exposition of the theoretical and empirical issues; and, second, to provide an exposition of the relational nature of the state’s response in the Irish case.

To begin, it is necessary to tell a story which is partly based upon fieldwork and interviews, from media accounts and from official documents which were made accessible for research purposes and from which an extensive set of notes was compiled, including direct handwritten transcription of relevant parts of documents.³ This account underlines the theoretical and empirical challenges that were faced from the outset of this research endeavour.

Urban disorder and the urban periphery – A natural history

26 February 1991

Two senior civil servants, a Principal Officer (PO) and an Assistant Principal Officer (AP) from the Department of Justice, went on a visit to the Neilstown area of Dublin.⁴ It is situated in the northern half of the planned ‘new town’ of Clondalkin, approximately 12 kilometres west of Dublin city centre. On 27 February, the two civil servants each wrote reports and submitted them to the Assistant Secretary, the second most senior ranking of officials in the Department of Justice. The officials reported that they had witnessed scenes of despair and hopelessness amongst both local people and state and professional service providers working there. The Assistant Secretary prepared a memorandum for the Secretary of the Department, the senior official who briefs the Minister. In his memo he described the contents of the report of the PO and the AP as ‘disturbing’.

The officials had gone to the police station to meet the Gardai,⁵ and they described the attitude of the officers as ‘defeatist’. The Inspector, the most senior officer in the local Garda station, did not show up to meet them as arranged; he had availed himself of annual leave. The PO described the Station Sergeant who did meet with them as ‘useless’.⁶

Some discussion of this situation had taken place earlier between the officials and the Garda Commissioner, and they had in mind ‘some immediate steps’ they might take.⁷ In his report the AP told how the Garda station was dilapidated in its physical condition and that he had the impression that the police felt that the problems were ‘beyond them’. Arising from this briefing with the Gardai, he noted that a ‘hard core’ of 50 young people and a wider group of associates who gathered after dark had no respect for authority and were not subject to parental social control. The police, he wrote, were of the view that this group needed to be confronted to restore law and order. One of the strategies involved the police naming 31 individuals and their usual crimes, and sharing this directly with the Department of Justice. It seemed as if extraordinary challenges needed exceptional measures.

Tuesday, 19 November 1991

A car being driven by some young people moved at speed down Neilstown Road. Two Gardai in a patrol car were in pursuit. It was early on a dull and cold Tuesday evening. The road was about a mile and a half long and it was straight, enabling the driver to gain speed. The car was eventually driven to a piece of open ground. The drivers got out and were joined by another group of young people. The officers who were in pursuit moved in to make arrests, but they were prevented from doing so by the size of the crowd and by stones thrown at their patrol vehicle. They contacted their base by radio for assistance. The car driven by the young people was set alight. A number of other cars were alight at this time or shortly afterward. Reinforcements arrived on the scene and were met with stones from the young people (Byrne, 1991). The fire brigade was alerted and arrived on the scene to attend the burning cars. Six fire fighters received injuries from stone throwing as they attempted to deal with the fires at Neilstown Drive (Editorial, Sunday Tribune, 24 November 1991, p. 1). These events were carried as the main item of news the following morning on the radio, and they made headlines in the various print media for a good part of the following days, including the front page of a then significant Sunday newspaper (Bowden, 2006).

Monday, 25 November 1991

The Assistant Secretary at the Department of Justice wrote a memo to the Secretary. He appended three separate reports on the riots from the Garda Superintendent of ‘L’ district and an article from the Sunday Tribune newspaper. He implored the Secretary to inform the Minister at the earliest, as he was concerned that these events could escalate into the large-scale rioting experienced in Britain in the 1980s.

Officials were watchful of the activities of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) in the peripheral areas of Dublin. They were more concerned, however, that efforts should be made to ensure that there was support for the police force to prevent a recurrence of the policing crisis in the inner city during the 1980s. Police–community relations in the inner city were at a low, given what appeared to be the inability of the police to stop heroin dealing, which was a key factor in the emergence of the citizen anti-heroin movement, the Concerned Parents Against Drugs (CPAD) (see Bennett, 1988). The primary concern amongst the officials and police was the extent to which members of the Provisional IRA had penetrated into civil society. In one area, for example, they were seen as effectively operating their own community centre and their own youth service.

The officials at the centre of the fact-finding efforts surrounding these events urged that the Minister should meet immediately with the Garda Commissioner and his colleagues about the situation. The Secretary, on receipt of a memorandum that contained newspaper articles on the events at Ronanstown appended with handwritten notes, suggested to the Minister that he should read it as a signal from the police for his help.

On Tuesday 26 November 1991 an urgent meeting took place between senior Justice officials and Garda management to discuss urban policing problems, just 24 hours after the Secretary had advised the Minister. That evening of Tuesday 26 November 1991, the Minister for Justice, Mr Ray Burke TD, met with the Garda Commissioner. The events of the week culminated in an address to parliament.

Wednesday, 27 November 1991

An adjournment debate on ‘Violence and Vandalism in Dublin Suburbs’ took place in Dáil Éireann, the lower chamber of the Irish parliament. It was addressed by the Minister for Justice, Mr Ray Burke. The Minister told the House that he had taken a direct personal interest in the difficulties with juvenile vandalism in some Dublin suburbs, and as a direct result of his enquiries he had set up two projects in two peripheral areas of west Dublin. The riots of 19 November had prompted the government, he suggested, to ‘take special steps to improve the delivery of support and community services to these areas’. While noting that he had met the Commissioner the previous evening, he said:

I am satisfied that the Force at this time is very conscious of and committed to its responsibilities of preserving public order and the freedom of the public to go about their daily lives in peace and safety. The contribution made by Gardai at all levels towards the various community projects I mentioned earlier has been enormous. It’s at times like this the public see how important the role of the Force is in our national life.⁸

He told the House that it was because the issues behind ‘juvenile vandalism’ were so complex that it was not within the capacity of any single minister of government or any agency. For this reason, he was drawing together senior officials of the Departments of Environment, Education, Labour, Health, Social Welfare and Justice at Assistant Secretary level to submit proposals.

From early 1991, officials in the Irish government were aware that the Neilstown/Ronanstown area would be, in their own terms, a ‘major flashpoint’ of urban disorder. It is apparent from this chronological, documentary account that the state was concerned at the absence of policing strength and the crisis of policing morale in the urban periphery. At this point, then, the state organized a response involving senior officials of government departments, agencies and the police force, to which I will return in Chapter 3. Ultimately, this activation led to the extension and dispersal of over 100 youth crime and disorder prevention initiatives throughout Ireland. The initial stages of this process were incorporated under the police community relations strategy. In more recent years, the initiatives, which became known as the Garda Youth Diversion Projects, were moved to the Youth Justice Service. The focus of the research in this book centres on this earlier stage.

These initial observations are not simply events in a narrative, but raise questions about the wider meaning and significance of the processes at work. They provide insights into the nature of the state and its relationship with civil society, but they also provide a unique insight into the local governance of crime and early attempts at community safety in Ireland. This provides a detailed study of low-level crime control in action, but it raises a wider question about the nature of governance.

The key theoretical problem here concerns governance of the urban peripheral territories. A key argument developed in this book is that governing territory involves symbolic violence. Consequently, there are two key dimensions in addressing this theoretical and empirical challenge. The first is to understand the development of the urban periphery as a distinct crystallization of space and time in the life of the city; as a question of territoriality. The second problem concerns the integration of the periphery within a common (national) cultural system: values, shared understandings and a common agreement on civil behaviour resulting in a governance of the subject.

The methodological frame is made more complex by the intermediate position of the institutions of civil society. A specific characteristic of mobilizations of governing strategies in the Irish urban periphery during the period studied is the role of civil society organizations. This book centres upon research that sought to disentangle the relations between the state, the police, civil society organizations and the generation of young people involved in the urban disorder. The players in this game are the officials of the central state apparatus, the police force, a range of civil society organizations working with young people, the young people themselves and the neighbourhoods in which they live. This constitutes an arena of conflict and contestation in which there must be some form of struggle so that the governors can govern and the ‘ungovernable’ can be civilized.

The key argument of the book is that we might see the preventive turn as constituting a kind of symbolic domination of both territory and subjects. Moreover, the argument has been put forward by Garland (2001) that there is a cultural turn in governing: shifts from welfare to governing through responsibilization, which requires the cultivation of a new subjectivity. But what is missing from this analysis is how this withdrawal is played out in socio-spatial and temporal terms: in the spacing and timing of urban context. In the years before his death in 2002, Pierre Bourdieu grappled with these issues as he sought to develop an understanding of the burden of social suffering at the end of industrial society in modern France. Bourdieu’s ethnographic work gives us an important key to unlock the theoretical and empirical challenges being addressed here.

The urban periphery and symbolic violence

In his book The Weight of the World, Bourdieu (1999) made a call for entering the ‘space of points of view’ which reflected his broad methodological approach. His call was for a sociology immersed in the field it seeks to analyse, where the social scientist occupies a variety of positions in order to understand how biographies and structures collide. Bourdieu sets the scene vividly in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures and Boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: The Theoretical Case: Governing Crime and Disorder in the Urban Periphery in Ireland, 1991–2008
• Part III: Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index