is a field of power (De Nooy 2003) or, specifically, of micro-politics. Stakeholders (organisations, institutions, social groups and individuals) in the field of community security governance compete and coalesce for notability (recognition, honour and prestige), economic resources, power, local knowledgeability, local and translocal support amongst other profits or capitals to be found in or brought to the community safety governance field. In essence, I view the field of community safety production as an arena of contestation and coalition for political, social, economic, cultural, and moral; amongst other capitals deemed important (see Appendix A). However, “action is not always an outcome of conscious calculation” or profit seeking (Thompson 1991: 16).
Bourdieu argues that the field is “the locus of relations of force – and not only of meaning - and of struggles aimed at transforming it, and therefore of endless change” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 103). The community safety governance field can therefore be conceptualised as a battlefield for access to various kinds of capital or profits and as a space for agents’ positioning for various types of interest and stakes.
The field of community safety production, while it is to be conceptualised as a field in its own right, is positioned in relationships (of power - competition and complementarity) with other fields. Importantly, Bourdieu conceptualises society as
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differentiated into a number of semi-autonomous fields (Benson 1999). He uses the concept of homology to denote and analyse connections and similarities between different fields (Bourdieu 1991a; Thompson 1991). He conceives society as “made up of relatively autonomous but homologous fields: interrelated social systems with competition for accumulation and monopolisation of field-specific forms of symbolic capital” (Stokke and Selboe 2009: 62). In this case, Bourdieu emphasises the homology between fields, arguing that there is a broad correspondence between power constellations and practices in different fields (Ibid: 63). For instance, there are general “homologies” across fields where those who are in dominant positions in one field also dominate other fields (Ibid: 63). The boundaries between various fields interlace, such that the community security governance field intersects with the political, economic, juridical, religious and other fields; and struggles and capitals have potential to circulate between fields.
I conceive the community safety field as intrinsically linked to the political field, or as a subfield of the political field. If one is sensitive to geographical or sociological scale they can, for example, refer to the concept of community security field when describing dynamics related to peace and stability within a neighbourhood and to security field when describing higher levels of security governance or when being deliberately oblivious of scale.
Analysing the form of struggles in the community safety governance field, I argue that as stakeholders therein compete and coalesce for the various kinds of capitals, interests or stakes, they engage in multiple economic, social, political, cultural, moral and spatial practices. The field of community safety governance can on its own be viewed as a miniature of political, social and moral economies (Arnold 2001; Bouchard, Ferraton and Michau 2006; Sayer 2000). It is therefore an arena for the economy of practices (Bourdieu 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992); a space for a constellation and juxtaposition of interests and stakes. Relatedly, Warde (2004: 12) expresses that “the field operates like a game”, wherein agents adopt strategies (and tactics) in competition for status. These strategies and tactics include the exercise of symbolic violence by competing and coalescing stakeholders.
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Central to the idea of practice is the notion of strategising. The concept of strategising encompasses the assumption that actors have “goals” and “interests”. The idea of strategy in Bourdieu’s view is designated to locate the source of actors’ “practices in their own experience of reality – their practical sense or logic - rather than in the analytical models which social scientists construct to explain that practice” (Jenkins 1992: 72). The practitioners and strategists in the community safety governance field are community organisations, social groups, individuals and institutions such as the state and private sector amongst others (Figure 6).
Practices in the field are informed by some rules (unwritten and written) - what Bourdieu refers to as doxa. I argue that the micro-politics of community safety production follows a particular logic informed by the habitus of involved stakeholders. In making this argument I indicate that the collective or individual behaviours of actors in the community security governance field are informed by their histories and cultural grounding - that is their habitus. The habitus of individuals and collectivities structure socio-political and spatial practices, habits, perceptions and relations between agents in the community security governance field.
In fact, public participation is central to drama (practices and strategies) in the community safety governance field. Micro-politics of community safety governance is playable in spaces of participation. How can Bourdieusian “thinking tools” help us understand participatory safety governance? What is the link between public participation in community security governance and symbolic domination? I maintain that participatory safety governance is fraught with concealed and explicit power dynamics that undermine its very purpose and essence. Following Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic domination; I argue that participatory safety governance is an arena of subtle and outright domination of weaker social institutions or organisations, social groups and individuals by the more powerful (see Figure 8).
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Figure 8: Participatory safety governance and relational politics
In this case I analyse two heuristically distinguished spaces of participation in community safety governance - that is the invited and invented spaces. Invited spaces of participation are those whose setting up is sponsored or mandated by government or private agents (Bourdieu 1977; Lefebvre 1991), while invented spaces of participation are those that are spontaneously created or claimed by people at the grassroots levels (Cornwall and Gaventa 2001; Gaventa 2004; Gaventa 2006; Gaventa and Valderrama 1999).40 At its practical level, participatory security governance is considered as
“deliberative” or “communicative” (Barnes 2011; Dryzek 2003) - in this case involving meetings by neighbourhood residents for discussions and debates on matters concerning neighbourhood safety.
As observed elsewhere and reinforced here, participation is sometimes, if not often times, a fallacy. This is because of the dynamics of (symbolic) domination (by the elite or state agents) of the citizenry that are weaved into its processes (Arnstein 2011; Katsaura 2012; Swyngedouw 2011a). Using the concept of misrecognition, Bourdieu argues that the dominated are (actively) complicit in their own domination because they tend to misunderstand the system that dominates them; thereby perpetuating their very domination (Bourdieu 1991a; Webb, Schirato and Danaher 2002). It is
40In my view, the distinction between invented and invited spaces of participation is only heuristic
and the issue of grassrooted-ness is a myth. This is because there is always a power behind the invitation of people to participate in these spaces.
State agents: SAPS, Metropolitan Police, Department of Community Safety etc. Community organisations (coalescing, competing) Multiple agendas?
Broader community: social groups (ethno-national groups)
South Africans
Non South Africans
Symbolic domination Cooperation Ethno-national rifts: Ethno-national mingling Cooperation, tension Source: Author
Invited/invented spaces of participation: symbolic domination Invented/ invented spaces of participation: cooperation, contestation
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possible therefore, in reading Bourdieu, to argue that participatory safety governance is an instrument for domination of the citizenry; an arrangement which reproduces socio-political domination (and repression) rather than liberate the citizenry (Ruteere and Pommerolle 2003).
By sharing the thought of participatory democracy and being habitualised (subconsciously or consciously) to evaluate society through the lenses of lay or intellectual democratic thought, it is possible that subaltern groups “share a system of organising and evaluating society that works against them” (Thompson 1991: 23). The habitus which is a product of accumulated history, a history of domination in this case, can produce and reproduce practices that sustain the citizenry’s submission to the established order (reproducing habitus of submission) (Bourdieu 1991a; von Holdt 2012a). However, “dominated individuals are not passive bodies to which symbolic power is applied, as it were, like a scalpel to a corpse” (Bourdieu 1991a: 23). “The dominated can exert a certain force of resistance to domination” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 81). Von Holdt shows that this resistance is encapsulated in bodies of defiance - defiance against authority (von Holdt 2012a). Such “bodies of defiance” operate in the realm of insurgent citizenship (cf. Holston 2008). I use the concept of “insurgent citizenship” to describe community security governance initiatives that operate outside the prescribed state arena, in opposition to or alongside it (Holston 2008). This means that communities have potentials to create their own local moral orders which may be insurgent (von Holdt 2010).
At a micro-level, there is a possibility of the elite to accumulate, concentrate and pocket the means of local social influence (Katsaura 2012); thereby domination the community safety governance field. This can undermine the values of democracy, generating what I conceptualise as an “anti-democracy of democracy” - a democracy that unwittingly or wittingly undermine the very democratic intent as stakeholder interests takes precedence over the common good. Similarly, writing about the decline of urban politics and role of civil society, Swyngedouw (2011) and Ferguson (2006) suggest that civil society, which is generally celebrated as creating and nurturing democratic space, should be viewed through lenses that unpack “anti- democratic” tendencies within it (Ferguson 2006; Katsaura 2012; Swyngedouw
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2011a). Spaces for the community governance of security can therefore be analysed as epitomising the “contradictions” of democracy (Holston 2008).
Further undermining the democratic intent in the community safety governance field is the possibility of political dispossession of masses. This happens because the articulation of the collective agenda is sometimes done by or through delegates. Such individuals (delegates), if elected, are considered to possess delegated political capital and if they lead out of their heroism or charisma, are considered to possess personal political capital (Bourdieu 1991a). As they claim to speak for the collective, some delegates may also engage in double dealings (Bourdieu 1991a) or multiple dealings (Benit- Gbaffou and Katsaura 2012); pursuing personal interests, sometimes at the expense of collective interests, in the process (Wacquant 2004). In some or many cases, leaders (delegates) are complicit in state activities. Because they are the power behind the mobilisation of people to participate in community safety governance, leaders articulate agendas that may be pro-state, sometimes to the detriment of the citizenry. The state, multifarious as it is, has a tendency to dominate spaces of participatory safety governance (directly or at a distance); sometimes undermining the very intentions of safety production or the core goals (articulated goals) of these participatory spaces. I am sceptical that the state, being inscribed in human minds and habitualised in human practices, always finds its way into spaces of deliberative community safety governance; symbolically or outrightly dominating these spaces. The symbolic domination of the state is buttressed by its attempt to monopolise the capital of physical force (for example, through the police, army and intelligence) (Bourdieu 1998a). Of the state, Bourdieu writes:
“The state is a culmination of a process of concentration of different species of capital: capital of physical force or instrument of coercion (army, police), economic capital, cultural capital or (better) informational capital, and symbolic capital. It is this concentration as such which constitutes the state as the holder of a sort of metacapital granting power over other species of capital and over their holders” (Bourdieu 1998a: 41).
The state’s presence and influence in the field of community safety governance should therefore not be a surprise. Being a bank41 of symbolic capital, a centre of meta-
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capital or statist capital; the state has the propensity to dominate the socio-political world - influencing people’s thought patterns, social worlds and their everyday practices. Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of that state entrenches the idea that the state does not exist only “out there” in the guise of bureaucracies and authorities; it also lives “in here” (in people’s habitus and daily encounters). It is ineffaceably engraved in persons in the form of state-oriented mental categories acquired via schooling and different mechanisms of socialisation through which “humans cognitively construct the social world”, so that they already “consent to its dictates prior to committing any political act” (Wacquant 2004: 8). However, in some circumstances, rather than think “through” and “with” the state, residents think “against” it, viewing it as a dangerous presence – kleptocratic, criminal and violent (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006a; Voronin 1997).
As my presupposition goes, like schooling, participatory safety governance bonds human beings to the state, inculcating the state into them. This is because the modalities, content and form of participatory safety governance are influenced, if not shaped, by the state or the “thought of the state” (Bourdieu 1998a). It is not surprising that when it comes to community security governance, citizens tend to “think through the state”42, “with the state” (Bourdieu 1998a) and sometimes against
the state. They possess a statised or statist habitus - evaluating their safety and other situations in terms of the failures, successes and obligations of the state. The state is therefore “fetishised” (Bourdieu 1991a).
Theoretically exploring the positioning of social groups in the community security governance field, I focus, through deploying Bourdieusian thought, on unpacking dynamics of urban ethno-national regionalist politics?
4.6.3. Ethno-national regionalist politics and community safety governance