Building Community Cohesion Research Articles

The new commission for equality and human rights: Building community cohesion and revitalizing citizenship in contemporary Britain

This article is an examination of some of the key aspects of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights in Britain proposed in the Fairness for All White Paper in 2003. The article focuses on the role the new Commission will play in the specific areas of revitalizing citizenship, building community cohesion and in conflict resolution in contemporary Britain. It examines the presentation in the White Paper of the “anticipated future challenges” (in relation to ethnic and religious minority groups) that allegedly threaten 21st century Britain and the role the Commission is to play in responding to them. It will be suggested that the ‘core functions’ of the proposed Commission are closely related to many of the developments associated with radical democratic theory, that is: 1) the promotion of intersectional and de-centred social identities and concomitantly an intersectional perspective on inequality and discrimination; and 2) the development of an overarching project that encourages the construction of chains of equivalence between diverse ‘protected groups’ within a culture in which human rights are respected as the ‘common place’ of citizenship. The article concludes that the most significant threat to the Labour government's promotion of a human rights ‘culture change’ as suggested in the White Paper is the government's increasing disrespect for human rights in the name of the war on terrorism.

Patriots of the Future? A Critical Examination of Community Cohesion Strategies in Contemporary Britain

This paper focuses on four inter-related areas of recent public policy in Britain associated with community cohesion, asylum and immigration, the Strength in Diversity consultation strategy and counter-terrorism. This paper comprises of a critical examination of the various reports, speeches and strategies associated with these areas of public policy. The central concern of the paper is to explore the relationship between these areas of public policy through illuminating the extent of the ‘policy tropes’ common to each, for example, (1) the problematisation of the weakness of ‘citizenship’ in contemporary Britain and the strategy for revitalizing it, common to all four policy areas; (2) the emphasis on ‘the material’ over ‘the cultural’ in the explanations of ‘weak integration’ in these policy areas; and (3) the ethnic and religious minority focus in all four areas. The relationship exposed between these policy tropes is then used in the paper to suggest that the focus on ethnic and minority communities (especially young Muslims) within this discursive formation, belies a barely repressed risk consciousness that informs the wider rhetoric of building community cohesion in twenty-first century Britain.