Un espacio para la reflexión

4.2.1 Social Cohesion

Overall, the literature since 2011 is not very expansive on social cohesion as a mechanism or process that addresses factors protecting against or influencing racism, violent extremism or other forms of exclusivism. Many articles that refer to social cohesion either remain vague in their understanding of the concept or are critical of social or community cohesion policies and rhetoric. These critiques are especially prominent in work deriving from the United Kingdom (UK), which has grappled with a number of specific and acute policy challenges and external events in recent years. It should be noted that much of the UK analysis draws on British policies and terminology that differ from the Australian context in a number of respects, including Australia’s long and well established multicultural policy framework. Canadian and Australian work on social cohesion identifies five key dimensions of social cohesion: belonging, inclusion, participation, recognition and legitimacy (see chapter 2.1). This conceptualisation, however, does not seem to be widely used in the UK, where the bulk of the literature on cohesion comes from and where cohesion was more concerned with ‘positive relations’ between people of different backgrounds (Cantle, 2012). The actual meaning of social cohesion (or community cohesion in the post-2001 British context) remains ambiguous, and many articles highlight these ‘definitional confusions’ (Ariely, 2014; Dandy and Pe-Pua, 2013; Nasser-Eddine et al., 2011; Husband and Alam, 2011; Rutter, 2015).

It is therefore difficult to identify empirical evidence that clearly addresses the question of how social cohesion address protective or influencing factors in ways that mitigate socially harmful forms of exclusivism. This is further complicated by a) the lack of scholarly certainty about the nature of these factors and b) the fact that widely acknowledged micro-factors located at the level of individual emotions or personal psychological characteristics do not easily align within the social cohesion model.

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Many of the reviewed articles generally recognise social cohesion in principle as a positive social goal, although they usually do not specify what exactly this encompasses. Other articles, however, paint a critical picture of social cohesion as a concept. Their critique is rooted in the conceptual blurriness around social cohesion which allows it to serve as ‘code’ for a number of different policy agendas, including CVE (Rutter, 2015: 76). The commonly used holistic and multi-dimensional definitions of social cohesion (Markus, 2015; Cantle, 2012), which encompass elements as diverse as identity and shared values, trust, equity and experiences of discrimination, are seen to ‘represent an empty vessel into which a variety of concerns are poured and rearticulated’ (Flint and Robinson 2008, cited in Rutter, 2015: 78).

Overall, this view of social cohesion questions whether it is effective as a social, policy or governance tool that prevents or protects against anti-social behaviour, whether violence, crime, racism or any other form of exclusivism. This is due not only to the perceived fuzziness of the concept but also attributed to the fact that social cohesion is defined by, among other factors, the absence of ‘exclusion’, ‘isolation’ and ‘rejection’ (Jenson, 1998: 15). This refers to the fundamental conceptual question of social cohesion as either ‘a cause or a consequence of other aspects of social, economic and political life’ (Beauvais and Jenson, 2002: 5). The literature since 2011 does not resolve the tautology of how social cohesion is supposed to address racism or racial discrimination if social cohesion is defined as the recognition of diversity and equal opportunities for all members of society. This is linked to an understanding of social

cohesion as a ‘continuous and never-ending process of achieving social harmony’ (Markus and Kirpitchenko, 2007: 25), which does not provide sufficient scope to effectively address and manage conflicts and tensions that naturally occur in pluralistic modern societies (Rutter, 2015). In the Australian context, Ho (2011: 614) makes the same argument, suggesting that while social harmony is ‘a laudable goal, it is not always realistic in a highly diverse society in which different groups of people inevitably have conflicting interests and worldviews’. In a similar vein, Rutter proposes redefining social cohesion as ‘the capacity of people and places to manage conflict and change’ (emphasis in original),

moving the concept away from a ‘managing minorities’ context to ‘relations between all groups of people’; this requires ‘individual resources and civic skills’ but also ‘public space where people can meet and mix’, and ‘political leadership that deals with the root causes of tensions’ (2015: 79). A large proportion of articles emerging largely (though not exclusively) from evaluations of the impact of Prevent programs in the UK examine the relationship between social cohesion and, in particular, countering violent extremism. They are primarily highly critical of social cohesion policies when used and implemented as a means to CVE (Bonino, 2013; Jarvis and Lister, 2013; Kassimeris and Jackson, 2012; Lakhani, 2012; McDonald, 2011; McDonald and Mir, 2011; O’Toole et al., 2012; Romaniuk, 2015; Spalek, 2014; Spalek, 2011). Skoczylis (2015) used a rigorous mixed methods approach (including analysis of policy, program evaluations, a case study of local community; interviews and focus groups with politicians, senior civil servants, police, program staff Muslim community members) to explore the impact of

Prevent. He found that the Prevent strategy ‘blurs the boundaries between crime prevention and social policy, creating ambiguity amongst national and local professionals’ (Skoczylis, 2015: 183). In effect, communities perceived social cohesion policies, such as those that address jobs, homes or education, to have been swallowed up under a law and order discourse, only having value if they help to prevent violent extremism. Kassimeris and Jackson (2012) find that this discourse perpetuates misconceptions of Muslims as dysfunctional and culturally responsible for the contemporary terror threat.

Following the Prevent Review in 2011, social cohesion policies were separated out from the Prevent strategy. However, Skoczylis (2015) argues the impact of this has been mixed, with local level authorities particularly concerned about the difficulty of receiving funding for projects that are not explicitly linked with CVE, and communities seeing the renewed Prevent to be utilising social policy as a surveillance tool, effectively criminalising activities related to Islamist ideologies regardless of whether they are violent or non-violent. This is largely due to an accentuated focus on the adoption of British cultural values that has been interpreted as a push to assimilate and which has

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