This article argues that the UK government's Community Resilience Programme is less about responding to disasters and more a matter of producing community and governing its behaviour. The passing over of responsibility to local volunteers and organisations is not only about empowerment, but also about forming identities and relationships that can be more efficiently managed and directed. However, this attempt is hamstrung by its basis in a nostalgic, romantic view of community and the effacement of poverty and inequality as central to the vulnerability/resilience binary. The effect may be a more intense government of communities rather than their empowerment through resilience.
for their invaluable comments and criticisms after hearing and reading earlier versions of this paper. I'd also like to thank the excellent editorial team and three anonymous reviewers for their extremely generous comments, criticisms and suggestions. Mistakes remain my own.
Research Highlights and Abstract The article seeks to make a contribution in the following areas: Demonstrate that the ‘Big Society’ agenda, while based on a dichotomy with ‘Big Government’, in fact produces a diffusion of bigger, better government throughout British society. Illustrate that despite claims of the Big Society being a matter of empowerment, its diverse tactics and techniques of what Foucault calls ‘governmentality’, or the ‘conduct of conduct’, shows the opposite: management and control. Outline the logic of the Big Society and how it has played out in two important policies of the Coalition Government: National Citizen Service and Community Resilience. Suggest that while the ‘Big Society’ targets widespread behavioural change, the ultimate aim is to produce a population of efficient, responsible, productive and self‐governing individuals and communities. Cameron's flagship policy of the ‘Big Society’ rests on a society/government dichotomy, diagnosing a ‘broken society’ caused by ‘big government’ having assumed the role communities once played. The remedy is greater social responsibility and the ‘Big Society’. This article argues that the dichotomy is deceptive. We aim to show that the Big Society is big government, as it employs techniques for managing the conduct of individuals and communities such that the mentality of government, far from being removed or reduced, is bettered and made more efficient. To illustrate this, we explore two major initiatives: the National Citizen Service and the Community Resilience programme. These projects demonstrate how practices of informing and guiding the conduct of individuals both produce agents and normalise certain values, resulting in the population being better known and controlled. Thus, far from lessening government and empowering people, the Big Society extends governmentality throughout the social body.
Phone: +44 (0)2890 973165 Fax: +44 (0)2890 975048 2 Jacques Derrida's writings on hospitality make him, along with Emmanuel Levinas, perhaps the concept's foremost theorist and describe a rich textured web of paradoxes and uncertainties.While it is conventional to begin with a definition of hospitality, Derrida (2000: 6) warns us that 'We do not know what hospitality is', as it 'rebels against any self-identity, or any consistent, stable, and objectifiable conceptual determination'. Yet, despite this chronic ambiguity, we are offered Derrida's apparently un-Derridean assurance that hospitality is ethics (Derrida 1999a: 19); not just an ethics, but ethics itself (Derrida 2001: 16-7). While immensely provocative, this claim is not really unpacked nor its implications drawn out in the depth one might wish. Furthermore, Derrida links this notion of hospitality as ethics to an understanding of power and control as sovereign mastery, a link which is potentially very limiting for how we use and understand hospitality in a global context. This article seeks to reaffirm the importance of hospitality for discussions of international ethics, but also to suggest a way in which we can push beyond the limitations imposed by Derrida.When we interrogate the implications of hospitality as ethics, we reveal a constitutive link between ethics, power and space within practices of hospitality. As it operates to form relations between self and other, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, those distinctions also need to be policed, managed and controlled, even after the threshold of the home is crossed. Such management and administration of hospitality takes us beyond sovereign mastery and its statist implications. Furthermore, the acts of welcoming and controlling work to produce the home itself, its spatiality (internal and external borders) and its affectivity (feelings of belonging and nonbelonging). I argue that if we are to retain Derrida's aim of transforming and improving the practice of international hospitality (2001: 22-3), we must pay attention to the ways that his assumptions are being disrupted.The article begins by exploring what it means to say that ethics is hospitality in an international context, arguing that actual acts of hospitality can be conceived as spatial and affective relational practices. The second section outlines the implications of this claim for the power relations operating in practices of hospitality, especially those that manage the space of the home and (re)produce its affective dimensions. The third section examines what an investigation of spaces created as homes through everyday practices of international hospitality might look like, focusing on refugee camps. These are non-state, non-sovereign, extra-territorial spaces that are produced through the practice of a hospitality towards those most in need, thereby disrupting the assumptions of Derrida and international ethics regarding who/what can be a host, a home and
Ethical foreign policy persists as a problem of international relations, especially regarding humanitarian intervention. However, despite apparent international upheavals, the debate about the ethics of humanitarian intervention has remained fundamentally unchanged. To escape the limits of this debate, this article deconstructs British claims to ethical foreign policy since 1997, reading these claims against themselves and against contemporary humanitarian intervention literature. It finds that Britain’s ethical framework, the ‘doctrine of international community’, which justifies interventions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, is undone by the anomalous, yet exemplary, invasion of Iraq. This demonstrates the politics of ethical foreign policy: first, that any intervention, no matter how ‘ethical’ or ‘right’, produces suffering and death; and, second, that we cannot know for sure whether we are doing the right thing by intervening. Embracing, rather than effacing, the political nature of ethical foreign policy opens up a more intellectually honest and positive potential future for relating to the foreign in a responsible manner.
The human is frequently made central to the way international ethics is thought and practised. Yet, the human can be used to close down ethical options rather than open them up. This article examines the case of British foreign policy in Kosovo. It argues that the human in this context was placed at the centre of ethical action, but was discursively constructed as a silent, biopolitial mass which could only be saved close to its territorially qualified home. It could not be protected by being brought to the UK. To remain human, the subject of ethical concern, the Kosovan refugee, had to remain near Kosovo. This construction of the human-home relationship meant that military humanitarian intervention became the only ethical policy available; hospitality, a welcoming of the Kosovan refugee into the British home, was ruled out. This article questions such a construction of the human, listening to the voices of Kosovan refugees to open up the relationship between the human and its home. The complexity that results shows that a more nuanced view of the human would not allow itself to be co-opted so easily to a simplistic logic of intervention. Rather, it could enable the possibility of hospitality as another way of practising international ethics.
Bulley, Dan and Debbie Lisle. (2012) Welcoming the World: Governing Hospitality in London’s 2012 Olympic Bid. International Political Sociology, doi: 10.1111/j.1749‐5687.2012.00158.x © 2012 International Studies Association London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games presented a diverse, cosmopolitan city opening its arms and “welcoming the world.” This article explores the apparently benign gesture of hospitality contained in London’s official candidature files submitted in 2004 and asks how such a promise of inclusiveness is managed. We argue that London’s depiction of itself as hospitable to every kind of visitor relies on subtle techniques of governmentality in which the subject positions of “host” and “guest” are imagined and produced in ways that make them more governable. By this, we are not referring to acts of authority, coercion, or discipline that exclude subjects or render them docile bodies within a rigid panoptical city. Rather, we are referring to the delicate ways in which the official bid document imagines and produces the ideal subject positions of host and guest and in so doing enables, encourages, and incentivizes certain behaviors. This analysis of urban welcoming takes us beyond reductive oppositions of hospitality and hostility, inclusion and exclusion, self and other. It focuses instead on how London’s inclusive welcome produces a variety of host and guest positions (for example, the “Olympic Family,” volunteers, guest workers), segregates them within the city, and then “conducts their conduct” in the areas of planning, security, transport, accommodation, education, and training. By analyzing the techniques of governmentality at work in London’s 2004 bid document, this article foregrounds the enabling form of power driving the city’s inclusive welcome and exposes its inherent micropolitics.
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