SDG 5 aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Browse books and journal articles relating to this SDG below and find out more on the UN Sustainable Development Goals website.
This chapter describes the emergence of the term Islamophobia in the British context, and deconstructs this term in order to better understand the elements that may be interacting in shaping people’s perception of contemporary events, and possibly driving feelings of antipathy and even hatred. Next, it explores the internal dynamics of Islamophobia. The populist anti-Muslimism can clearly draw on social imaginaries that have their roots in centuries of stereotype formation and in concrete relations of dominance and subjugation. Anti-Muslimism serves contemporary personal and political needs, and its power lies not in the internal coherence of its discourses, but rather in the eclectic possibilities for co-option to different agendas that this semi-ideology provides contemporary British society with. The fusion of the sociopolitical and the social-psychological dynamics provides a qualitatively different understanding of the resilience and potential political potency of anti-Muslimism.
This chapter describes the development of the Community Cohesion policy in Britain. It starts by placing the development of Community Cohesion within the context of British ethnic relations. Among the issues discussed is the early history of ‘race riots’ and the response to them, as the response to the 1981 riots and the subsequent Scarman Report has a significant role in framing the response to the more recent events. The chapter further highlights the ideological nature of Community Cohesion as policy and discourse. The murder of Stephen Lawrence was the result of a racist attack. Among the findings of The Macpherson Report, it concluded that the police had failed to carry out its duties due to a range of factors including institutionalised racism, professional incompetence, and a lack of leadership on the part of senior officers. Racism had not been eliminated by the last five decades of the twentieth century.
This chapter reviews some of the implications for the understanding of the operation of the local state in implementing central government policy. It also adopts a wider perspective to ask whether the Prevent and Community Cohesion policies can be credible in the absence of a robust assault on the reproduction of inequalities in Britain. Furthermore, the broader conceptual issues of how a democratic polity may be constructed are explained. It is noted that those Muslim groups that retain a principled objection to accepting Prevent funding may enhance their prestige within segments of their community, but they will nonetheless suffer financially. Events in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq are seen as germane to the circumstances and concerns of Muslim communities in inner-city Britain. The balancing of Community Cohesion, security, and individual autonomy cannot be aspired to in a world where rights can be relativised as an act of political expediency.
This chapter starts by discussing the organisational context and response at the local level to the introduction by central government of the two policies. It then examines the political impact of Prevent. The implications of the management of Funding for the understanding of how resistance to Prevent had implications for the ways in which it was implemented, while the issue of The ‘Usual Suspects’ indicates how concerns with security and community resistance interact in shaping the local authorities’ engagement with local communities. Next, the chapter shifts from a focus on the personal to a concern with Community perceptions of the implementation of these policies. It is impossible to isolate one policy from the implications of other government actions. The data gives substantive support for the concerns that have been expressed elsewhere regarding the damaging impact of Prevent on Community Cohesion initiatives.
This book examines the apparent tension between the inherent logics of the two constructions of the Muslim population, as the two related policies of Community Cohesion and counter-terrorism (Prevent) emerge to address them. Both Community Cohesion and counter-terrorism policies have a generic remit that provides for them to address the majority white population, all minority communities, and Muslim communities. Community Cohesion appears to offer an invitation to greater participation in civil society by Muslim communities at the cost of biting the assimilationist bullet, while the counter-terrorism strategies of Prevent unambiguously assert that they must share a common burden of being targeted as legitimate objects of suspicion through the assertion that terrorist activity is being nurtured within their communities. An overview of the chapters included in this book is provided in this chapter.
This chapter provides an explaination of the emergence of counter-terrorism policies in Britain following the London bombings of 7 July 2005. The issue of the ways in which the terrorist threat comes to be popularly understood is investigated, and the symbiotic relationships between the media, the government, and terrorists are reported. A brief exploration of the ‘securitisation’ of urban policy is also presented. The chapter then offers a discussion of the tension between security and civil freedoms, and the significance of the assault on support for human-rights principles for the understanding of both how the political process of putting Prevent in place, and evaluating its impact, have been shaped by these wider issues. The introduction of Prevent posed a challenge for local authorities and was met with a range of negative responses from within Muslim communities and elsewhere. Anti-Muslimism has been nurtured by the media environment in post-9/11 Britain.
Post 9/11, the imposition of policies of counter-terrorism has seen the erosion of support for fundamental human rights. Simultaneously, Muslim communities in European cities have become a focus for state and local policy, leading to a fixation with policies of social cohesion.
This book offers a unique research-based contribution to the debate around community cohesion and counter-terrorism policies in Britain. Through privileged access to the senior management and staff of five metropolitan authorities it reveals the contradictions between these policies as they are implemented in tandem at the local level.
A robust critique of contemporary policy, this book is for all academics, policy makers and practitioners concerned with the management of ethnic diversity.
As youth work becomes more managed and formalised, there is an instinctive reaction among youth workers against all ideas of targets, products and outcomes, in the struggle to maintain informal and non-managerial relationships with young people. Unfortunately, this reaction can be rather inarticulate. The language of both accreditation and so-called smart outcomes (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timed), with their promises of measurable and completed results, seems to have robbed youth work of its ability to express and explain itself on its own terms and in its own more subtle vocabulary.
However, in rejecting the current managerial vocabulary of an outcome-led approach, there is a danger of denying that good youth work actually does have very powerful achievements. The basis of youth work is the forward movement of young people, in a way that is chosen by young people, and not directed towards externally imposed targets. The process itself is valuable, but we believe in it because it also achieves more. We need to be able to describe this.
There is a constant concern that youth work should be directed towards process, as distinct from products. However, the ‘products’ of youth work should not be undervalued, as they can be intrinsic to the ‘process’. One of the underlying intentions of youth work is to enable young people to do things for real, rather than postpone meaningful action until they reach adulthood. Young people attend youth projects because they enable them to live now, not wait for some deferred future. Youth work can, even should, result in products that are valuable for young people.
This thesis has not glossed over the complications and disorders of community, nor constructed unities or certainties where they cannot be found. It is what Plummer would call a late modernist story: ‘Modernist tales largely provide [a] sense of order, whereas emerging late modernist stories are drenched in ambiguity’.1 In this account, community as a claim to order has been replaced by community as a site of ambiguity. Ambiguity does not, however, reduce the imperative to engage with the issues raised: if anything, the imperative is increased. If young people take part in action that is both joyful and destructive, neither laissez-faire neglect nor disciplinarian policing can provide an effective response: a more serious engagement is necessary. Without certainty to rely on, engagement and action become more important, if more problematic, as facets of social life. This final chapter looks at some of the issues of engagement with community.
Engaging with, or for, some ‘thing’ as unattainable as community at first appears futile. If there is no achievable end, why make the effort? There is a persuasive argument, however, that it is because of the lack of a secure end that there exists such a strong desire for community and connectedness. Community illustrates what Zizek calls the ‘very paradox of desire’:
We mistake for postponement of the ‘thing itself’ what is already the ‘thing itself’, we mistake for the searching and indecision proper to desire what is, in fact, the realization of desire. That is to say, the realization of desire does not consist in its being ‘fulfilled’, ‘fully satisfied’, it coincides rather with the reproduction of desire as such, with its circular movement.2
A recurring motif in the writing about Southmead from outside has been that of lack of community. In contrast, there have been assertions of community that come from within, as in the community play, but even in these instances community was seen as a thing of the past, currently lacking. Moving around Southmead, there is a sense of fluidity, of nothing as solid as something that could be called community. Instead, there is a strong sense of place, but place as fractured. The activities of young people described in Chapter Six display collectivities based on a yearning for connectedness, but a connectedness that is always temporary and shifting. However, despite all these signs that Southmead is not a community either in or for itself in any stable form, there are a number of vigorous organisations in the area that proclaim both Southmead and community as bases for social action, active users of the term community. This chapter looks at four of these organisations: the Southmead Project (SP), a drugs project; the Southmead Development Trust (SDT), a charity and limited company that runs a training and leisure centre; Southmead Parents’ and Children’s Environment (SPACE), a group of parents running activities for children; and Voice of Southmead, an anti-drug dealer campaigning group that lobbies for improvements and provides activities for young people.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the local organisations that exist. At a meeting of the Southmead Estate Working Party, a local umbrella group, in October 1994 (before three of the organisations mentioned above had been formed),there was a discussion as to whether it was good or bad that there were 28 different groups operating in the area: did this number show strength or division?1 This question is considered crucial if unity is seen as important to community, what Bhabha calls the ‘progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion – the many as one – shared by organic theories of the holism of culture and community’.2
