Classify, Exclude, Police. Laurent Fourchard

Classify, Exclude, Police - Laurent Fourchard


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analysis of colonial cities as dual cities or areas in which coercion was tempered solely by forms of resistance misses the essence of what thirty years of historiography has taught us about Africa. Colonial societies cannot be understood merely as antagonism between Europeans and natives (Cooper 1994; Eckert 2006, p. 213), which reduces the colonial encounter to binary opposition (elites/subalterns, domination/resistance) (Bayly et al. 2006, pp. 1452–1456). The notion of the dual or racialised city overestimates the ability of administrations to implement steady public policy and ignore the dispersion of colonial power into a multitude of locales and authorities. It overlooks the capacity of local societies to circumvent, ignore or even conceive of such divisions differently and misses the pervasive social effects of other forms of colonialism in urban Africa.

      First, the racial delusion of colonial power was articulated to other forms of classification based on residence, origin, gender and age, which together constitute a classifying obsession needed to govern urban areas. Colonial authorities were faced with contradictory injunctions. The first was the will to assign migrant populations to rural areas and the need for those same populations as manpower for the urban or the industrial economy. One of the solutions was to provide them with a specific place of residence and grant them different rights from the more permanent urban population even if this was difficult to implement as populations keep moving between urban and rural areas (what is referred to as the population flottante in French colonies). A second issue arose from the labour policies aimed at identifying and promoting an autonomous male working class, which became the standard against which a large part of the urban population became criminalised. ‘Unemployed’, ‘idle’, ‘unruly’ youth and ‘single’ women without wage jobs were increasingly seen as contributing nothing to the colonial economy, whereas their ordinary behaviour threatened the authority of chiefs, elders, husbands and wage workers. The invention of a nomenclature designed to rule by classification was central in governing the most dominated social groups in cities under the colonial rule.

      Part II retraces the genealogy of policing carried out by organisations in low‐income neighbourhoods from the colonial period to the present. In the policing literature, there is a distinction between law enforcement carried out by the ‘police’ – the name commonly used to designate a state organisation with a specific mandate – and ‘policing’ which designates a plurality of organisations including the police (Garland 2001; Jobard and Maillard 2015). This second part focuses on groups and individuals policing neighbourhoods often included under the term ‘vigilante’. It wishes to open up a nascent dialogue between comparative urban studies and the history and anthropology of policing to rethink the act of policing in low‐income neighbourhoods.

      Vigilantism is sometimes understood as another form of neoliberal government (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Goldstein 2005). The delegation of security to private actors takes part in a move towards what David Garland rightly calls ‘responsibilization’ that is, the acceptance that individuals should be held responsible for their own security (Garland 1997, pp. 190–191). This well resonates with the neoliberal urbanisation argument in comparative urban studies. Since the 1990s, large metropolises have been identified as essential vehicles for the reproduction of neoliberalism – understood as a body of doctrines imposing the adoption of universal free market values. They are described as showcases for major macroeconomic transformations and privileged spaces for testing multiple schemes: areas granting tax exemptions, public–private partnerships, new strategies of social control and surveillance, multiplication of urban enclaves for the middle and upper classes (business clusters, shopping centres, gated residential communities and industrial parks) (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Caldeira 2000; Davis 1992; Peck and Tickell 2002). This privatization of urban space is closely connected to the geography of fortified enclaves while vigilantism is more especially associated with peripheral urban areas in which residents feel ignored by the legal state (Glebbeek and Koonings


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