Theoretical Criminology, 2005

Theoretical Criminology
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Sovereignty, biopolitics and the local government of crime in Britain

Kevin Stenson
Theoretical Criminology 2005; 9; 265
DOI: 10.1177/1362480605054811
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Theoretical Criminology
2005 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi.
www.sagepublications.com
Vol. 9(3): 265287; 13624806
DOI: 10.1177/1362480605054811
Sovereignty, biopolitics and

the local government of crime
in Britain
KEVIN STENSON
Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College,

UK
Abstract
Fears about macro-level crime join those about local volume crime,
inter-communal conflicts and governance emerging to manage
them, presenting challenges for analysing commonalities and
differences at various spatial levels. Governance theories crystallize
in debates about security. Realist governmentality theory transcends
discourse analysis of mentalities of government, and a focus on
security, arguing that security practices manifest the struggle by
local state institutions for sovereign control over populations and
territories (biopolitics). Illustrated by rural and urban examples of
biopolitical struggles, this highlights interaction between official and
informal biopolitics, the latter involving communal groups
attempting to govern from below. This creates tensions between
universalistic/liberal, and particularistic, nationalist agendas, and
also the recognition of multi-cultural, communal identities and
interests.
Key Words
biopolitics community safety governmentality security
sovereignty
Introduction
The management of crime, risk and fear and the recoding of other
governmental issues under these headings have ascended the political
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Theoretical Criminology 9(3)

agendas of the advanced liberal democracies (Stenson, 2001b). In Europe,
post-9/11 security fears have reinforced concerns about such macro-level
issues as terrorism, people, arms and drug smuggling, in addition to local
ones about public or community safety. While there is no internationally
accepted term, this refers to: public order, and the management of fear and
insecurity, inter-ethnic violence, routine violent and pecuniary crimes
against the person, personal and public property, women, children and the
elderly. In Britain there is increasing state concern that several years of
decline in overall official crime rates is not matched by public perceptions
revealed in the annual British Crime Surveys. Many remain fearful and
pessimistic about the ability of authorities to manage (still rising) rates of
violent crime, and anti-social behaviour, variously defined and mostly
unreported (ODPM/Home Office, 2004). The broader context includes:
increasing political, economic and cultural global interdependence; technological change, economic restructuring and associated inequalities; migration from the East and South into Europe of people fleeing the results of the
collapse of communism, political destabilization, war, famine and interethnic conflict; and the effects of this inward migration on inter-communal
relations and social cohesion in poor urban neighbourhoods of increasingly
complex demographic composition (Stenson, 2001a; Crawford, 2002a).
This article will first explore the implications of this interest in local
crime control and public safety in relation to a political, linked with a
spatial, turn in criminology, given that a concern with the local governance
of crime and safety entails a sensitivity to spatial differences. This applies
both to recognition of different levels of governance and how these issues
are managed in different places, even within the same nation state (see
Edwards and Hughes, this issue). Contrast is drawn between discursive
governmentality and institutional political science approaches, which
transcend neo-Marxist approaches, and which are influential within criminology. The former highlights shifts in the mentalities, or rationalities,
underpinning the change from social, universalistic, to targeted, risk-based
liberal government. The latter is a body of institutional research and
conceptualization, in part drawing on discursive governmentality theories,
that traces the uneven impact of the effects of globalization and the
modernizing reforms of the New Right in the 1980s and 1990s.
These approaches focus on security, variously conceived, as a field of
common objects and concerns, downplaying the centrality of sovereign
state and law. An alternative realist governmentality theory is presented,
supplementing discourse analysis of mentalities with grounded, empirical,
realist analysis of governing practices, and drawing on both bodies of
theory and research. Concern with security accentuates governing from
above, the operation of partner governing agencies, at the expense of
examining interaction between governing from above, with governing
from below: the role of informal political players in the local struggles for
territorial control, and the politics of crime and safety. With illustrative
references to local research in the UK, this approach identifies common,
StensonSovereignty, biopolitics and crime

and locally differentiated, features of the governance of public safety. It
acknowledges the importance of state institutions, and the struggle for
sovereign control over territory and diverse and competitive populations,
with demands for it coming from below and above. This manifests
contested biopolitics, or population management. This usually refers to the
systematic attempts to make populations thinkable and governable through
professional expertise underpinned by state categories and data, and the
social and biological sciences (Foucault, 1979: 141). Biopolitics in official
mode also includes coercion and the struggle for solidarity, involving
tension between liberal/universalistic, and nationalist/particularistic values
and identities. This argument extends the concept to include folk biopolitics, governance from below, acknowledging that ethnic, religious,
criminal and other sites of governance in civil society do more than resist
state power. They have their own agendas of governance, forms of knowledge and expertise deployed to govern and maintain solidarity in and over
their own territories and populations.
Political and spatial turn in criminology

Criminologists echo political actors in their concern with volume crime,
risk assessment and fear, in both domestic and public settings. This marks
a political turn in the theorization of crime and control, albeit one which
has yet to penetrate far into the criminological mainstream. This recognizes
that the politics of crime and control affects not simply contexts of crime
and societal reaction. What does or does not become defined as crime, how
criminal behaviour is organized, reacted to or not and controlled, all
embody political relations in the widest sense, rather than just struggles
over control of the state (Stenson, 1991; Stenson and Edwards, 2001).
Concepts like crime, community safety, security and justice embody their
variable institutional and cultural history (Nelken, 1994). Moreover, in
unequal societies with asymmetrical power relations, local public/
community safety policies claiming to represent the collective interest
cannot be taken at face value. Promoting social cohesion and security for
the majority demonizes minorities, raising the question: public safety for
whom?
Social harms categorized within the province of public or community
safety vary. Organizing for public safety could link hazards from disorderly
youth on the street to terrorism, creating local administrative empires in the
governance of crime and insecurity. Yet, in practice, regulatory responsibilities are more segregated. Local governing agencies categorize domestic
violence and gender conflict separately from other dimensions of community safety, downplay speeding and other social harms caused by automobile
use, and those created by the wealthy, and business communities, or
allocate their regulation to other departments or agencies (Corbett, 2003;
Croall, 2004). Vandalism, noisy neighbours, public use of alcohol and
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illegal drugs and other incivilities described as anti-social behaviour (an
increasingly mobile signifier) are prioritized. Recidivist offenders are defined as elements of the heterogeneous socially excluded other population,
variously in terms of the categories of age, gender, class, ethnicity and
neighbourhood, the characteristics of the excluded, rather than excluding
institutions (Young and Matthews, 2003). In ageing European societies,
preoccupied by security fears and immigration, this means defining deviance up: a diminishing tolerance for youthful incivilities, reinforced where
there are class, ethnic and other markers of difference (Hornqvist, 2004).
This requires recognizing the wider political constraints on and uses
made of criminology. Matzas critique (1969) of the positivist assumption
that crime could be defined, described and explained independently of the
actions of law and state remains apposite in critiquing explanations of
crime that, for example, focus on personal biographies and family dynamics, downplaying the wider contexts of offending and social control
(Farrington, 1997). This is also applicable where social science claims to be
apolitical, internationally transferable, expertise. Self-described crime science illustrates this, claiming to help policy makers, on the basis of
accredited evidence about what works in reducing opportunities for
offending (Clarke, 2004). This is despite its inability and unwillingness to
theorize and study variations in the political, economic and cultural
contexts in which policies are applied, and their outcomes, including crime
displacement, and other unintended consequences (Hope and Karstedt,
2003; Stenson and Edwards, 2004).1
Nevertheless, competing narratives share the view that the definition and
explanation of crime and control, and their social effects, are intrinsically
political and bound up with new forms of the governance of populations
and social conflict. Recent perspectives differentiate themselves from earlier
neo-Marxism. This had emphasized the drift towards a law and order state.
In this view, the new economic order requires monopolized, coercive,
sovereign state authority to suppress and contain social dislocation and
resistance (Scraton and Chadwick, 1991). Neo-Marxist accounts may focus
on particular sub-national operations of state rule, but the individual case
illustrates the general functions of state power, rather than facilitating the
conceptualization of sub-national variations in the politics of crime control
(Coleman and Sim, 2002).
It is possible to differentiate two newer approaches that emphasize issues
of governance and crime, even if they involve some internal differences, and
at times overlap: discursive governmentality theory and institutional
political science studies. The former theorists are sceptical about claims
that economic relations are determinant in the last instance, and attributing
too much coherence to the functioning of the state, conceived of as an
integrated, collective actor defending and advancing capitalism. They view
the state in less monolithic terms, economic relations as politically constructed and political struggle and governance operating in multiple sites
beyond the confines of the state (Rose and Miller, 1992; Stenson, 2002).

These theorists chart the new forms of liberal democratic government
emerging since the 1970s (Foucault, 1991). Relying on key texts for
evidence, the focus is less on realist institutional analysis than on the
shifting discursive underpinnings of liberal rule. It highlights mentalities, or
rationalities, of liberal rule, where liberalism is understood as the contested
terrain of liberal democratic polities, not as a philosophy or a point on the
ideological spectrum (Rose, 1996). The narrative traces shifts from early,
free market models, to, from the late 19th century, variants of social,
biopolitical rule, or population management: fostering health, wealth,
discipline and well-being. This was underpinned by new statistical techniques facilitating the identification of population norms, census and other
state categories and data, and the burgeoning of knowledge and expertise
created by philanthropy, the social and biological sciences and new professions of care and control (Foucault, 1977, 1979). This social mode of
rule shares risks in the actuarial pool of the nation state, through universalistic service provision, displaced, from the late 1970s, by advanced liberalism. This was the fruit of New Right reforms fostering self-governance,
deregulation, privatization and the introduction of market disciplines into
the public services. The rhetoric of locality, responsibilization and community fosters self-organization, through Neighbourhood Watch, purchasing
security goods and so on. Hence, many citizens rely on exclusive, risksharing communities, symbolized by the gated community and the degradation of public spaces deemed risky.
The narrative depicts a dominant penology emerging to manage populations unwilling or incapable of acceptable self-organization. Just deserts or
welfarist/rehabilitative responses to offenders are downplayed in favour of
risk assessment and management: containment rather than retribution or
cure (Feeley and Simon, 1994). The focus on risk involves a constant
struggle to translate the random, uncertain threats we face into actuarially
knowable, and calculable risks (OMalley, 2004). This generates new
technologies, expertise, measures and professional cadres among the police,
revamped, and new, criminal justice professions, in which the aggregation,
analysis and brokerage of data about crime and insecurity between partner
agencies become central. Hence, populations are rendered thinkable, mapable, measurable and sorted into hierarchies for the purposes of government (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997; Stenson, 2000a). This illustrates the
recoding of social policies under the heading of crime control: governing
through crime (Simon, 1997). It is claimed that in a range of countries the
development in the 1980s of local partnership-based approaches to public
safety, combining public, commercial and voluntary sector agencies, to
crime prevention and Neighbourhood Watch, are also illustrative of a shift
towards government beyond the state in most policy spheres (Rose, 1996;
Garland, 2001).
Through avoiding monolithic conceptions of the state, this version of
governmentality theory, so far the one most influential on criminology,
highlights the plurality of sites of governance beyond the liberal state,
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downplaying the role of sovereignty, the monopolized, legitimate use of
coercive force in the name of law and nation state to control geographical
territories and populations (Rose and Miller, 1992). Where recognized,
coercive, sovereign technologies of governmentfor example, war, brutal
punishment, prohibition, restraint and sanctionare viewed as monarchical survivals (Garland, 1996). There is a generalizing character to this
work, lacking concepts operationalized to differentiate national and subnational variations in governance.
Shifts in government, and power dependence

Second, a range of empirical, institutional, political science research has
been influential in theorizing and researching the local governance of crime
(Crawford, 1997, 2002b; Rhodes, 1997; Hughes, 1998). Empirical studies
have sometimes drawn on governmentality theory but assessed theoretical
claims through analysis of general trends in the new architecture of
governance, emerging from modernization in the 1980s and 1990s.
Modernization included assaults from the centre on the independence and
tax base of local authorities, the creation of alternative sites of governance
and New Public Management: introducing market disciplines to the public
services through target setting, and auditing (Audit Commission, 1999;
McLaughlin et al., 2001). This bypassed local authorities, channelling
targeted resources to dislocated areas via centrally controlled urban regeneration programmes, from the Safer Cities and later urban regeneration
programmes under Conservative, and, from 1997, under New Labour
administrations (Stenson and Watt, 1999a; Stenson and Edwards, 2003).
Hence, modernization aimed to change the relations between the tiers
and spheres of government from national to local levels, producing partnerships traversing statutory, commercial and voluntary/not-for-profit institutions and citizen action, and raising issues of democratic accountability
(Loader and Walker, 2004). The broader context was the long-term agenda
to simplify the ancient structures of British government, with their divisions
of labour between tiers and spheres of government, rivalries, noncoterminous boundaries of administrative territories and limited exchange
of information.2
Echoing Welsh and Scots devolution, amid reawakening English, rather
than British, nationalism, this aimed to reduce governmental tiers and
aggregate governmental responsibilities to eight regional governmental
centres and elected assemblies. Each has a crime director to co-ordinate
public safety and crime control strategies, mediating between the Home
Office (the ministry responsible for crime and justice) and municipal and
criminal justice agencies, including multi-sector local strategic partnerships,
and local crime reduction partnerships. The latter are required, by the
Crime and Disorder Act 1998, to create three-year cyclical crime reduction
strategies, on the basis of crime audits. However, the complexity of ancient

institutions has obstructed centralist, reforming zeal of both right and left
administrations. Analyses of local multi-agency governance of crime highlight tensions between local and national policy strategies, and those
dealing holistically with the deeper causes of crime and fearfor example,
in relation to poor schooling, health and employment opportunitiesand
tough controls on problem groups and neighbourhoods. This is in addition
to examining the relative power of police and partner agencies in emerging
policy networks, and the possibility of creating a consensual basis for such
strategies (Crawford, 1997; Rhodes, 1997; Hughes and Gilling, 2004).
Hence, this research questioned the thesis that the New Right had driven
through reforms and suppressed dissent through an authoritarian state.
Civil society institutions mediated sovereign command, creating a gap
between policy and implementation because state agents depend, especially
in a liberal polity, on subordinates for the exercise of power (Rhodes,
1997). This power dependency facilitates avoidance of and resistance to
policies, for example by police forces jealously guarding their local autonomy (Savage, 2003). In the case of crime prevention partnerships, for
example, new interests emerged in the asymmetrical balance of agency
resources and decision-making power (Crawford, 1997).
The publication of the Home Office Morgan Report (Home Office,
1991), advocating local authority-led community safety partnerships was a
watershed. Though not adopted by the Conservative government it encouraged urban, Labour councils to develop various holistic, social community safety strategies, flourishing until the accession of New Labour in
1997. However, New Labours prioritizing of strong law enforcement,
especially the reduction of burglary and robbery, Best Value, Audit
Commission reports and other new regulatory controls and targets,
strengthened centralized controls. Framed in micro-economic categories
emanating from the Treasury (the finance ministry), they reduced local
discretion and segregated crime reduction from wider holistic policies
(Stenson, 2002). This crime reduction strategy, costing several hundred
million pounds, including 250m for evaluative research, was based on a
review of evidence-based crime control policy. The research agenda has
helped shape the direction of UK criminological research under New
Labour (Goldblatt and Lewis, 1998).
Narratives of security
Political science analyses of shifts in governmental architecture in other
European countries (Crawford, 2002b) involve a mix of idiographic case
studies and attempts to identify national, or international trends. Drawing
on both discursive governmentality theory and political science research,
there are narratives that generalize about the new forms through which
crime is governed in the advanced liberal democracies (Garland, 2001).
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Such narratives identify common processes and objects, facilitating comparative analyses through conceptions of security (Zedner, 2004). Its
meaning varies between notions of right, commodity and public good
(Stenson, 2001b). Narratives of security, for example, may view pluralistic
policing as involving interacting nodes of security provision, traversing
statutory, commercial and not-for-profit sectors and creating multiple
bubbles of security from aircraft in flight, to shopping malls, to gated
communities (Johnston and Shearing, 2003).
These formulations downplay sovereign state institutions. Echoing arguments that view the nation state as hollowing out or even dying, state
agencies are seen as competing nodes in the market for security. It is argued
there is decreasing faith in public sovereign authority, and increasing
reliance on private security and citizen action. This maximizes the risks and
dangers in poor, under-policed zones (Kempa et al., 2004), and there is
increasing emphasis on the control of offenders through contractual compliance.3 This blurs criminal and civil law in the government of crime,
illustrating a shift from sovereign criminal, towards community, justice:
modes of regulation that prioritize negotiation, discretion, mediation and
restorative modes of justice (Crawford, 2003).
This has generated a terrain of debate within the field, about the general
applicability of these explanations (Jones and Newburn, 2002), the extent
to which the new pluralistic modes of security can deliver social as well as
criminal justice, and be democratically accountable (Loader and Walker,
2004). Radical critiques have also attacked attempts to extend state powers
by exploiting fear, and creating apparently depoliticized, technical, security expertise and practices, progressively removed from democratic scrutiny (McLaughlin et al., 2001; DeLint and Virta, 2004). However,
narratives of security constitute a view from above, spotlighting the
complexities of the intra- and inter-institutional relations of control agencies. This is at the expense of examining the varying contexts of the
governance of crime, and interaction between formal agencies of control
and the activities and agendas of the populations being governed. How can
we escape reliance on security to conceptualize our field of common objects
and concerns, and facilitate comparative research?
Realist governmentality theory

Drawing on both governmentality and political science analyses, this
alternative theory builds on a body of work that has challenged the
dominant versions of discursive governmentality theory. It supplements
discourse analysis with historically grounded, realist, analysis. This position privileges political relations and sovereignty: the struggle for control of
populations and geographical territory, ultimately through the monopolization of the threat or use of coercive force in the name of transcendent law
and state authority. It views economic relations as politically constructed

and reinstates the significance of the state. Security is not a given object of
study, but ratherlike communityis a series of rhetorical tropes and
practices deployed to govern crime (Stenson, 1993, 1998, 1999, 2002;
Stenson and Edwards, 2001, 2004; Dean, 2002). Even if the state is not a
monolithic, unitary collective actor, at least in the advanced liberal democracies, where state, public sectors can account for between 30 to 50 per
cent of GDP, it is implausible to reduce state organizations, with huge
command over resources, to the status of equivalent nodes in the market
for security (Hirst and Thompson, 1996; Zedner, 2004: 3023). Sovereign
practices operate in the name of and with the resources of central state
authority and law. This is so even where elements of sovereign power, for
example, electronic surveillance of offenders, are sub-contracted to commercial corporations (Paterson and Stenson, 2005).
However, this theory does not view sovereignty as a monarchical survival, nor simply as a function of the state and law. Coercion is tied with
national biopolitics: centripetal practices to overcome the centrifugal tendencies within pluralistic, liberal market societies. Discursive governmentality theory fails to recognize that universalistic liberal rationalities and
modes of rule developed within the womb of particularistic nationalism
and remain shaped by it (Stenson, 1998: 3423). Nation states have been
based mainly on commonalities of language, religion and other cultural
values, common institutions, perceived ancestry, shared historical narratives and local sensibilities of place (Smith, 1986; Loader and Mulcahy,
2003). This is rooted in doctrines of the nation state crystallized in the
Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. This provided the basis ofalbeit
asymmetricalagreements between states to respect their increasingly secular, deconfessionalized, jurisdiction over territory and populations (Hirst
and Thompson, 1996: 171; Hunter, 1998). Social solidarity projects,
albeit often based in grass roots action, were a product of organic, nationbuilding, shaped by the varying historical and cultural conditions of states
(Dench, 1986; Esping-Andersen, 1990).
At one extreme, French public policy still reflects secular, republican
values, limiting tolerance of demands for separate status for Moslem and
other minorities, deemed to threaten the ideals of shared citizenship. By
contrast, and with affinities to Dutch multi-culturalism, the UK emerged
organically through compromises between the state and the dominant and
minority Christian religions, ethnic and regional minorities, capitalist and
labour organizations. This nurtured robust civil society institutions (Dench,
1986). Thus emerged its history of multi-culturalism, reinforced with
recent migratory flows, and the increasing ethnic complexity of the cities.
This generates tensions between agendas for constructing forms of particularistic, British, national solidarity, majority English identity, and the
attempts to defend the separate identities of minorities. For some minority
lobbies, the latter combine with principles of liberal/universalist human
rights that, it is claimed, transcend, and should be enforceable within, a
given nation state (Parekh, 2000; Stenson, 2005). These tensions operate
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within particularistically defined national identity and citizenship in the
wider national culture, creating powerful emotional linkages between
people, culture, identity and place in the majority population (Gellner,
1983).
However, constructing solidarity, or community cohesion among the
majority may reinforce social exclusion (Young, 1999). Combinations of
class, ethnicity, sub-cultural and other intersecting markers of difference
identify the excluded other, the province of control agencies (Reiner,
2000: 934).4 As elsewhere in the EU, debates about exclusion, crime, fear,
risk and perceived threats from populations cast in the role of the other
are yoked with those about immigration and the demographic make-up of
the UK, drawing these biopolitical issues from the racist fringes into the
liberal centre ground (Goodhart, 2004). The UK, a population magnet with
steady economic growth under New Labour, is the only EU country to
experience recent population growth, by legal and illegal means.5
Governance from above and below

Central policies and commands are mediated by local differences in
community governance, and the local forms of habitus among political
agents: the cultural, emotional and instrumental repertoires and dispositions for cognition and action. We can understand this at two levels. First,
there is a local politics of crime control involving the statutory agencies,
part of the struggle for transcendent sovereign domination through official
biopolitics and professional expertise. Second, there is a level at which the
official agencies blur into more informal sites of governance struggling for
territorial dominance from below. Here we extend the concept of biopolitics to include folk modes of expertise and knowledge. These often
operate through oral discourses, in the effort by a range of collectivities,
with varying degrees of formality, to govern geographical territory and
populations within their orbits. This involves, for example, spontaneous
gatherings, residence associations, ethnic, religious, criminal and paramilitary organizations, and youth self-organization. It also includes demands
coming from below, filtered through and reinforced by the media, for state
agencies to exercise sovereign authority over areas and populations deemed
deviant (Watt and Stenson, 1998; Stenson, 1999; Stenson and Watt, 1999b;
Lea, 2002).
The struggle for sovereignty is most salient locally, rather than in the
functioning of central ministries and the interaction between states. There
are concerns about the extent to which the local municipal authority, police
agencies, prosecutors, criminal justice agencies and commercial corporations control the town centre, highways and poorer neighbourhoods, where
competing, illegal economies and modes of governance may challenge
sovereign authority6 (Stenson and Edwards, 2001). In the cityscape a
subterranean semiotics of territorial markers, ranging from gang graffiti, to

paramilitary symbols, operates alongside the brand symbols of nation
states and large corporations (Ferrell, 1996). These provide traces of local
struggles over scarce resources such as control of street turf, jobs, housing
and so on. They operate within the wider framework of depictions of
insider and outsiderother status, represented now in mediatized images
in the wider national culture.
They also operate within deeper cultural grammars. In protestant Britain, for centuries Irish Catholics were viewed as suspect, perhaps owing
greater allegiance to the Vatican, or to an envisaged or actual Irish
sovereignty rather than the UK. Moslems, to the extent that they are
viewed as identifying primarily with the umma, the global community of
Islam, may have entered an analogous cultural space for those deemed
threateningly other to particular nation states, notwithstanding the complexity of Moslem voices and interests (Mac an Ghaill, 1999; Spalek,
2002). This illustrates the multiple nature of identity. Local communities
may be conceived of by both insiders and outsiders as elements of global,
diaspora populations, with competing loyalties and networks (Anderson,
1983).7 Hence, complex inter-communal relations, often coded in terms of
crime and anti-social behaviour, are the product of struggles over values,
beliefs, lifestyle, sexuality and sexual partners, as well as the financially
measurable material conditions of life (Stenson, 2002: 11424).
Reallocating sovereignty
The state reallocates sovereign powers upwards to international bodies like
the EU, Interpol and NATO and downwards to local government, other
sites of civil and commercial governance, the family, local communities and
the individual citizen (Stenson, 2001b). In European countries, state sovereign powers are reallocated in part to local executive agents to assess and
manage crime and related problems through links between mayors, police
chiefs, prosecutors, judges and other criminal justice agents. However, this
is mediated by different modes of governmental architecture, history,
culture and jurisdiction (Crawford, 2002b; and this issue inter alia).
Sovereignty is analytically operationalized in the ways its technologies,
or instrumental means, operate with others. Punitive sovereign technologies
aim to regain control over disorderly populations and areas, for example
through the disruption and control of open drugs and prostitution markets,
homeless beggars, street robbers and anti-social behaviour.8 The goal is to
improve the quality of urban life for the majority, and to drive offenders,
the homeless, graffiti taggers and psychologically damaged from public
spaces, re-conquered for mainstream economic and social life (Stenson,
2000b).
These technologies operate with CCTV, environmental redesign and
target hardening/actuarial risk management to impede offenders, reduce
victimization and increase use of public spaces; and community security
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technologies that try to promote solidarity and prevent crime by using a
range of means to prevent crime by dealing with its deeper causes,
regenerate poor neighbourhoods and defend affluent ones (Stenson,
2000a). Making sense of these hybrid practices in the politics of community safety involves examining, for example, in relation to prostitution, or
anti-social behaviour, how local political actors: interest others in translating, or problematizing, and responding to issues in their preferred terms;
enrol supportive coalitions to advance these problematizations; develop the
political dynamics of these associations; and relate between formal and
informal agents of governance (Stenson and Edwards, 2001: 7581).
Having identified some of the common ingredients in the struggle for
sovereignty through the governance of crime let us focus on how we can
make sense of local variations in the politics of crime control and public
safety, illustrated by examples taken from rural and then urban settings.
Rural biopolitics and community safety

Lower rural crime rates are not always matched by commensurate levels of
fear and anxiety. This was evidenced by research in the predominantly
rural, affluent and politically Conservative Thames Valley, in whose urban
areas, progressive, holistic community safety policies had been pioneered
(Stenson, 2002). As elsewhere in rural Britain there are small numbers of
non-white minority people who may be vulnerable to racist discrimination,
under-acknowledged by public authorities, but the main divisions are
within the white population, as are examples of constructions of otherness
(Stenson and Watt, 1999b; Chakraborti and Garland, 2004). This region
illustrates white flight from the ethnic and cultural diversity, social
problems and conflicts of the cities: people seeking secure work and
pursuing the dream of a white, English rural idyll. However, echoing
reports by the UK governments Countryside Agency (2001), hidden in
aggregate statistics are hot spots of deprivation and trouble, rarely reported
to officialdom. These manifest intense local conflicts in the public sphere as
well as troubled gender relations and domestic violence.
These problems can be traced to economic and social restructuring that
have affected rural life (Dingwall and Moody, 1999). The sale of rural
social housing and the invasion of villages by wealthy commuters have
increased property values, polarizing villages along class lines and progressively pushing the rural poor into nearby urban areas. A study of a
polarized village, with an isolated, unpopular social housing estatethat
included a number of feared families, recently settled in houses, but with a
history of nomadic, traveller lifestylesshowed that marginal populations
might be pushed out into the countryside from the town (Stenson and Watt,
1999b). In thisand similarneighbourhoods, the police and other governing agents seldom visited. Troubles were rarely reported to officialdom
and informal modes of governance from below over local territory, in the

forms of vigilantism, organized crime and patriarchal domestic violence
partially filled the vacuum. Attempts to introduce partnership-based local
governance had to negotiate with powerful networks defending their
informal, illegal agendas of governance. This illustrates the growing preoccupation of community safety partnerships with rural and urban social
housing estates of mixed tenure, increasingly used to locate people with
mutually interacting, multiple problems, from poverty, to criminality, to
mental disturbance, in a volatile mix (Flint, 2002).
However, local political responses can be limited, focusing on the
otherness, material and cultural poverty and alleged dysfunctionality of
the households of those seen as perpetrators. This reflects the limited ability
of the major victims of these conditions to conceptualize or win support for
a more complex diagnosis, or translation, of local problems and solutions.
In contrast to the large urban areas, local crime reduction partnerships
often rely narrowly on police crime statistics, highlight a minimal, law
enforcement response, and eschew wider holistic conceptions of crime and
community safety (Countryside Agency, 2001; Stenson, 2002).
As in other UK rural settings, there are bitter, sometimes violent, tensions
between settled residents and the UKs estimated 300,000 Roma, Irish and
other travellers, over the settlement of land under the jurisdiction of
sovereign law (Power, 2005). Travellers are perceived, not always fairly, as
a source of criminal threat and intimidation and the major threat to rural
community safety. Their lifestyles are deemed discordant with the life
rhythms of those tied into labour markets and schooling. This tension
stems from diminishing demand for the agricultural labour provided by
travellers, and, hence, increasing involvement in other economies for
income, and decline in municipally provided stopping places. This leads to
the creation of illegal settlements, sometimes on land purchased by travellers without relevant planning permission. Cowan and Lomax uncovered
the complex local politico-legal processes and professional habitus of local
officials in deploying punitive sovereign, law enforcement methods to
regulate traveller groups. These combine with risk management and welfarist, community security methods, focusing on the welfare of children,
attempting to draw travellers into lifestyles deemed acceptable (Cowan and
Lomax, 2003).
Urban biopolitics and community safety

Economic restructuringnotably in northern towns seeking to replace
older industriescreated social dislocations manifested, for example, in
social and geographical mobility, unemployment and illegal drug economies. This links with the growth of alcohol-based, youth-oriented, nighttime economies. In these settings, public safety is coded, principally, in
terms of the threat of anti-social behaviour, and what are deemed feral
forms of post-industrial masculinity. These urban centres have become
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increasingly age-segregated and violent, creating challenges for community
safety partnerships, with limited power to regulate the alcohol retail
industry upon which urban economies are increasingly reliant. This is also
associated with burgeoning organized crime networks, linked with the
security industry, and with an often ambiguous relationship between the
pursuit of profit and the maintenance of collective order and safety (Hobbs
et al., 2003). Here, attempting to reclaim sovereign control over urban
centres relies on a combination of law enforcement, commercial regulation
and the use of CCTVthat is, target hardening, actuarial methods of
governance (McCahill, 2002).
This is also illustrated by the port city of Liverpool that by the mid1990s had: lost much of its industrial base and population; high levels of
unemployment, petty and organized crime; and a large illegal drug-using
population. Co-existing with welfarist community security initiatives, community safety and regeneration were founded on a tough punitive sovereign
strategy, linking police with security personnel, which excluded marginal
groups from malls and other new sites of consumption. On Merseyside,
solidaristic community safety rhetoric could be in tension with regeneration
programmes favouring the infrastructure, leisure, arts and job development
that encouraged inward migration of the professional classes. The latter
heralded the new service economy and high-spending lifestyles, in contrast
to the local poor. This fostered tensions between classes and the criminal
victimization of the newcomers (Coleman and Sim, 2002; Hancock,
2003).9
In urban areas, inter-ethnic relations, defined in terms both of visible,
racial and also cultural markers of difference, are the most sensitive
biopolitical issues for community safety. Criminological discussions have
focussed on racial disparities (highlighting narrow visible markers of
difference) in offending, racist oppression by majority populations and
police and criminal justice agencies (Phillips and Bowling, 2003). However,
given the new demography, the latter framework is inadequate for understanding biopolitics in urban areas, with large and growing white and nonwhite minority populations competing for scarce resources (Fitzgerald et
al., 2002: 812). Home Office and police categories focus on racial
differences, and render culturally defined ethnic groupsfor example, large
Irish, Polish, Albanian and other culturally distinct lower-class white
populationsinvisible to criminology and the criminal justice system (Stenson et al., 1999; Waddington et al., 2004). Official practices have crucial
local influence on biopolitical relations. A Home Office report following
major clashes between lower-class whites, a denuded population following
white flight to the suburbs, and South Asian Moslems in northern towns in
2001, identified the key role of local authority policies, and exploitation by
racist organizations. Criteria for the allocation of targeted urban regeneration funding to areas of different ethnic settlement were opaque and the
report occasioned debate about overcoming segregation, cultural differ-

entiation and mutual accusations of criminal victimization (Home Office,
2001; Ousley, 2001; Webster, 2004).
The role of local professional habitus in partner agencies in determining
how crime and safety issues are translated for political action is further
illustrated by Adam Edwards research, in the mid-1990s in Leicester and
Nottingham, cities with large ethnic minority populations. Diverse community safety programmes flourished, with hybrid mixes of control strategies. They had similar industrial bases in textiles, large, African-Caribbean,
Somali, diverse Moslem and other minority populations, increasing
competitionas elsewhere in the UKbetween longer-settled, and more
recently arrived, minorities, and local polities dominated by the Labour
Party. Yet, they had different civic, political cultures and conceptions of
community safety.
Nottingham had a strong commitment to a holistic strategy, enrolling
local voices in poor, diverse neighbourhoods in formulating and applying
policy. Officials saw crime control as an element, not the core aim, of
regeneration programmes and the accent was on social, rehabilitative
community security strategies for young people at risk. In Leicester,
regeneration was seen mainly in terms of attracting inward investment and
crime control, order maintenance practices and investment in situational
crime prevention measures were prioritized, at the expense of involving
lower-class interest groups of diverse ethnicities. Hence, local social programmes for young people were downplayed at the expense of situational
crime prevention, policing and criminal justice responses (Edwards,
2002).
Elsewhere in Leicester, police and council officials resisted campaigns by
alliances of South Asian, Moslem and gentrifying, white residents to apply
zero tolerance punitive sovereign measures to drive out the sex trade,
which exacerbated ethnic and other tensions in the locality. Officials and
police promoted social measures including, for example, detached community work with prostitutes, and health promotion work, since driving
out the trade from this area would risk displacing it to surrounding,
politically powerful white areas. Community safety policy in this instance
was hybrid, linking social, community security measures with actuarial,
risk management, containment measures (Stenson and Edwards, 2001:
7981).
Conclusion
Advancing intra- and inter-national comparative studies of community or
public safety needs a theoretical framework to identify commonalities of
objects and concerns. It has been argued that it is better provided by realist
governmentality theory rather than theories of security. Given disruptions
to older links between population, identity, solidarity and territory, this
focuses on the struggle for sovereign, and less formal, biopolitical control.
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This operates in varying political, economic and cultural contexts, over
geographical territory and populations at different spatial scales. Criminology should avoid relying on state-favoured technical, depoliticized conceptual tools, insensitive to local context and political processes, to analyse
and manage local problems of crime and safety. It should also escape
general narratives of security focusing on the Byzantine complexity of, and
relations between, control institutions, at the expense of examining the
interaction between them and the populations and areas they try to
manage.
Narratives of security create seductive descriptions of sites of governance
beyond the state: competing nodes in more open markets for security. This
is an advance on the equation of government with topdown, monolithic
conceptions of the centralized nation state. However, discourses of security
are not politically innocent. In the advanced liberal democracies, it is nave
to present state agencies as simply operating on a common plane of security
provision alongside the commercial sector. This confuses criminological
categories with those used by the security industry. Moreover, echoing
parallel arguments in health, media and other service fields, security
discourse buttresses neo-liberal arguments deployed by commercial corporations wanting to privatize state services.
Realist governmentality theory, with its focus on biopolitics and the
struggle for sovereign control, offers criminology a radically different
replacement discourse to transcend debates about security. Its focus on
sovereignty is not simply a reprise of theories of the monolithic, nation
state. It recognizes the political construction of markets for security and
dependency by central policy makers on local officials and commercial subcontractors for the enactment of sovereign command (Edwards, 2005).
This creates space for resistance, and other adaptations at local levels of
governance, where the most salient struggles for sovereignty operate. This
theory pictures the polity as an arena of conflict, in which struggles over
symbolic and emotional issues can be as significant as those over material
resources.
This manifests the universal struggle over territory and populations. In
the advanced democracies with richly developed public institutions there
may be criminal and other sites of governance that avoid open contact with
official agents of sovereignty, or, as with paramilitary organizations in
Northern Ireland, they may be granted a grudging licence by sovereign
agents to rule their heartland neighbourhoods and maintain a rough form
of community safety. Yet, for religious, commercial, ideological and other
sites and agents of governance in civil society there are considerable
advantages in aligning their sectional agendas within the nationalist and
universalistic frameworks of sovereign law and the state. Such alignment
can buttress limited local or sectional resources with the awesome power of
the law and state resources. Though we should recognize that this may be
in sharp contrast with conditions in poor and transitional societies.
Criminology should recognize the role of political contestation and

spatial differences, at sub- as well as at national and supra-national levels
(Feeley, 2003). The centrality of sovereignty reminds us of the huge power
of the advanced nation state, but sovereignty is not simply a function of it.
It involves complex forms of official and informal, media-filtered, biopolitics, often in tension. Amid widening inequalities and diminishing
upward mobility of the poor (Paxton and Dixon, 2004), the UK Civic
Renewal policy responds to serious ethnic conflicts. It fosters citizen
engagement, integrating segregated populations and balancing shared,
human rights-based citizenship, with particularistic nation-building and
related professional expertise (ODPM, 2004); but this clashes with recognizing cultural difference (Stenson, 2005). This strategy is developed largely
within the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, while crime reduction
competes with the Civil Renewal agenda within the Home Office.
This tension is reproduced within local governing agencies, exacerbating
the gulf between crime control, and promoting solidarity and ameliorating
criminogenic conditions. These tensions, to differing degrees, ascend local
and national governmental agendas throughout Europe, mediated by particular variants of liberal rule along the continuum between French,
republican statism, and British and Dutch multi-culturalisms. Complex
inter-communal conflicts are increasingly coded under the simpler headings
of crime, fear and public safety: governing through crime. This coding
overloads the capacity of local police and criminal justice systems to
manage these political issues, at which level sovereign authority is most
obviously manifested and challenged.
Notes
Thanks to Adam Edwards, Gordon Hughes and Eugene McLaughlin for
comments on a prior draft.
1. This also illustrates one pole in the tension between generalizing, nomothetic and, on the other hand, idiographic, knowledge aiming to uncover
contextual differences (see Edwards and Hughes, this issue).
2. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 strengthened links between local authorities, police and other agencies in developing crime control strategies,
reinforced by the Local Government Act 2002, strengthening the executive
powers of mayors and chief executives. Furthermore, the Police Reform Act
2002 reinforced the sharing of policing tasks between statutory, voluntary
and commercial sectors. This was extended in 2004 with the expansion of
community support auxiliaries to sworn police officers and the formation of
plural Reassurance Policing teams (Innes, 2004).
3. This is illustrated, for example, in the UK, through the use of anti-social
behaviour orders, restricting the movement and behaviour of those targeted,
authorized by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Anti-Social
Behaviour Act 2003.
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282

4. For example, in the UK, the alleged characteristics of criminalized others
within the lower classes have entered folk narratives deployed by control
agents. Terms like scally, scrote, pikie, skaghead and yardie denote
lifestyles and identities deemed deviant (McCahill, 2002).
5. According to the Office of National Statistics, immigration doubled between
1993 and 2002, with population growth averaging 300,000 between 1992
and 2003.
6. Even in the advanced liberal polities, for example in Northern Ireland, rival
forms of local governance, from organized criminal economies to routine
order maintenance, through paramilitary organizations, may operate in the
name of an alternative nation state sovereignty (Stenson, 1999; Lea, 2002;
McEvoy and Mika, 2002).
7. These ethnic and other communal groupings are protean, and internally
differentiated by, for example, age, gender, class and religious tendency.
State officials involved in local community governance may, perhaps unwittingly, limit recognition of this complexity by according legitimacy to
conservative, patriarchal lobbies claiming to be community leaders
(Stenson et al., 1999).
8. This is exemplified in the UK, for example, in the measures of the Crime and
Disorder Act, 1998 and the Anti-Social Behaviour Act, 2003.
9. The control talk of officials and local parlance described the target populations of punitive sovereignty as scallies, the generic term for a population
of others deemed to lead a deviant lifestyle, and notorious throughout the
UK.
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StensonSovereignty, biopolitics and crime

Political and spatial turn in criminology

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Theoretical Criminology 9(3)

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StensonSovereignty, biopolitics and crime

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Theoretical Criminology 9(3)

Shifts in government, and power dependence

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StensonSovereignty, biopolitics and crime

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Theoretical Criminology 9(3)

Realist governmentality theory

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StensonSovereignty, biopolitics and crime

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Theoretical Criminology 9(3)

Governance from above and below

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StensonSovereignty, biopolitics and crime

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Theoretical Criminology 9(3)

Rural biopolitics and community safety

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StensonSovereignty, biopolitics and crime

Urban biopolitics and community safety

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Theoretical Criminology 9(3)

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StensonSovereignty, biopolitics and crime

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Theoretical Criminology 9(3)

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StensonSovereignty, biopolitics and crime

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Theoretical Criminology 9(3)

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StensonSovereignty, biopolitics and crime

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Theoretical Criminology 9(3)

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StensonSovereignty, biopolitics and crime

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Theoretical Criminology 9(3)

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StensonSovereignty, biopolitics and crime

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