Building from the Ashes: Towards a Three-Dimensional Approach for Social Work Intervention Facing Social Conflicts in Vulnerable Neighbourhoods

Abstract

About 56 percent of the world’s population lives in urban environments. In more economically developed countries, this percentage is considerably higher. Increasingly, cities’ more vulnerable and culturally diverse neighbourhoods are the context of violent conflicts linked to interconnected socio-economic (inequality), ethnocultural (discrimination) and public-institutional (delegitimation) causal factors. Social outbursts such as London (2011) or Husby’s (Stockholm, 2013) riots are amongst the most notorious recent examples of these. Both the frequency and intensity of these conflicts are only expected to worsen as the economic impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic takes hold. This article introduces the ‘Theory of Rupture Frames (TRF)’, which offers a new three-dimensional explanatory model of violent conflicts in vulnerable neighbourhoods with high socio-cultural diversity. The ‘TRF’, it is argued, offers a novel and suitable framework for founding and guiding social work’s preventative and healing-oriented interventions facing these. This is in relation to the TRF’s dual potential for (i) contributing to the theoretical understanding in the social work profession of this type of conflict and for (ii) offering a tool for guiding the assessment of needs and strategic planning of social work-led actions in the context of the neighbourhoods affected by the conflicts or at risk of their outburst.