Crime, Disorder and Symbolic Violence

Abstract

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’.