Didier Fassin, Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474513518703 |
| Author | Malin Åkerström |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
drift in and out of organization. These are indeed two different modes of social
organization, but there are other theoretical options around. Both Bourdieu’s con-
cept of field, capital and habitus and Giddens’ structuration theory include hier-
archies without describing them in the language of formal organizations,
corporations and bureaucracies. Bourdieu, for example, describes a social space
where people are positioned in hierarchies based on accumulation of different
forms of capital. This is seldom formalized, and instead based on the habitus or
embodied characteristics of those involved. In this way social life is in flux, but it
still has hierarchies and the positioned power of the actors is crucial to understand
how it works. Success in the street world is not coincidental.
The Gang and Beyond is engaging, original, provoking, important and surpris-
ingly humorous. Be prepared to be amused on this roller-coaster ride of the gang-
land Britain debate. If you are a ‘gang talker’ you should not let the rhetorical tone
and theoretical shortcomings be an excuse for not taking in the insights commu-
nicated. It is a welcome criticism of gang literature. Still, the author argues appro-
priately that deviants should be humanized (p. 194), but this book would have been
a lot better had it humanized the moralizers as well.
Sveinung Sandberg
University of Oslo, Norway
Didier Fassin, Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2013;
287 pp. (including index): 9780745664804
Didier Fassin spent 15 months with the French police, mostly with an anticrime
squad that patrols housing projects, ‘les banlieues’. In France about 8 million
people (out of a population of 64 million, or one person in eight) live in such
housing projects. Most of them are immigrants or ethnic minorities.
So why were special anticrime squads created? (These are small units that oper-
ate in a highly autonomous manner.) Fassin dwells not on the riots which have
occasionally flared up in these areas, but on politicians capitalizing on the issue of
immigration and riots, with ensuing policies of segregation and discrimination, and
on using the police as an instrument of social control.
The image of ‘les banlieues’ is sustained and nurtured in several ways: the trope
of housing projects as ‘no-go zones’, fostering a sense of danger and the notion that
ordinary police do not dare to go there, that instead special forces have to be called
in – the anticrime squads. There is an alarmist use of language, including meta-
phors such as jungle, savages, war, and so on in the media, in political speeches and
among the police officers themselves. Not only in speech, as in the use of meta-
phors, but also in symbols like the various badges worn by the squads, the image of
danger is used to enhance and dramatize the profession: a pack of wolves in front
of an apartment block, a panther with its claws ripping through a neighborhood, a
spider trapping a complex of high buildings in its web. The author contrasts this
600 Punishment & Society 16(5)
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