Crime, Disorder and Symbolic Violence Governing the Urban Periphery

This timely book provides a theoretical and empirical engagement with contemporary understandings of the governance of crime, safety and security. In the last two decades, criminological narratives have advanced a series of propositions on the nature of the late modern risk society. These narratives have based their observations primarily upon trends in the core, developed societies. This book presents an alternative perspective, exploring the nuances of the smaller scale and offering a rich insight into the historical and spatial specifics leading to the emergence of social crime prevention as a form of governing.

Using a Bourdieuian framework, Bowden shows how concepts such as capital, habitus and symbolic power can provide an analytic tool-kit for a critically engaged public criminology. This book argues that crime prevention can mobilise a type of moral curriculum and as such is a symbolic struggle for the domination of the subject and the domination of territory. Revealing a counter-practice which has the ability to reinvigorate social citizenship, this book will appeal to scholars across Criminology, Sociology, Crime Prevention and Community Safety.

Matt Bowden is a Lecturer in Sociology at the Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland.

Author Preface
PART I: INTRODUCTION
1. Urban Disorder and Symbolic Violence: Opening the Case
2. A Bourdieusian Perspective: Governing Territory and Subjects
PART II: THE THEORETICAL CASE: GOVERNING CRIME AND DISORDER IN THE URBAN PERIPHERY IN IRELAND, 1991-2008
Introduction to Part Two
3. The Dublin Urban Periphery, 1960 to 2008: A Political Economy
4. Symbolic Power and the Crisis of Territoriality: Urban Disorder in the 1990s
5. Symbolic Power in Three Peripheral Settings
6. Two Models In Action: Symbolic Violence Versus Ethico-Craft
PART III: CONCLUSION
7. Crime, Disorder and Symbolic Violence