Conference Sessions
The conference is organized around the following topics:
A__ POLICING CROWDS I: Sports and Security in the Neoliberal Era
Sport (or physical education) has always been a security issue since the Roman Empire and medieval times. In recent years the events at the Olympic Games in 1972, the Heysel Stadium disaster in Brussels 1985, and last but not least the clashes between Hooligans and state police in France 1998 are well known. But this is only one side of the coin as identification, surveillance and security in football stadiums and other sports facilities have changed dramatically in current years for for-profit purposes. By this, urban elites took the chance to use sport facilities as a testing ground for new surveillance technologies in general and crowd policing technologies in particular. As sports have been globalized and neoliberalized in an effort to commercialize the games tactics have been developed and deployed to change the visiting crowds by sanitizing football for a wealthier, more distinctive audience. As this was and still is contested territory, techniques such as video surveillance ('pornography of policing'), sophisticated access technologies (such as RFID chips), and architectures like those in Shopping Malls are widespread in North America and Western Europe.
B__ PRIVATIZING SECURITY I: Commodification of Security under Neoliberal Conditions
One of the fasted growing branches within the service industry is he private, or better: commercial rent-a-cop industry which in the last two decades experienced a tremendous growth; scholars trace its history back to the 19th century, and private actors have been the initial point of control and security work. Commodification and neoliberalization, moreover, affect all social relations, actors and the respective 'logic of action'. Inside the 'entrepreneurial city' the profit-oriented logic of action gains importance on all scales of crime policy and also includes, even though with differing intensity, state and nonprofit actors. In this panel we look into the increasing influence of the commercial security industry and new forms of cooperation, cooptation and conflict between state and non-state actors within crime policy (police private partnerships); finally, they will be categorized within the context of a neoliberal security state.
C__ POLICING CROWDS II: Neoliberalizing Public Space
Shopping Malls, the respective Mallification of football stadiums, the commercializing of inner-city space in general and the sanitizing and privatizing of railway stations and the creation of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) have become important parts of the "revanchist city" (Neil Smith) so heavily policed by rent-a-cops and state police. The same is true for the mushrooming of gated residential areas (or: gated communities) as they reflect intensified segregation especially in the city centers and more recently at the peri-urban spaces in the global south and given the current discussion in Germany the BIDification worldwide. Thus, these developments are indicators for city competition (and those between regions) as neoliberalism is implemented differently on different scales, thus developing new "urban management techniques" within the entrepreneurial city. We witness the simultaneity of fallback and "revenge" of the urban elites in a glocal perspective. Neoliberalism it seems takes hold on the global level and permeates all pores of the social. As Brenner and Theodore note, actual existing neoliberalism is also about regimes of coexistence and conflict on the urban scale. Different policy fields (such as employment and labor market policy) clarify that the accomplishment of the neoliberal project is not only about the roll back of the Fordist compromise but also about the search for and prove of new forms of capitalist regulation (roll out). Simultaneously, the neoliberal project as a project has to prevail in a conflict-laden process in situ to become a real, if never stable neoliberal product.
D__ PRIVATIZING SECURITY II: Heading for the Neoliberal Penal State
The increasingly punitive nature of criminal justice policies that are often biased against the poor, the growth of prison populations, and the re-birth of private prisons indicate a shift from the Fordist welfare state to a neoliberal 'penal state'. The rise and diffusion of 'three strikes' sentencing, 'zero tolerance' policing, 'anti-social behaviour' orders, or youth curfews give new momentum to the continuous tensions between inclusionary and exclusionary visions of social control while hybrid forms such as 'electronic offender monitoring' are being tested and normalised. Neoliberal modes of governance and more 'managerial' approaches in criminal justice provide fertile grounds for the emergence of both a 'correctional-industrial' and a 'surveillance-industrial' complex. The profit-oriented imperative, under which these powerful coalitions operate aggravate issues of social justice and human rights. This session aims to contribute to the understanding of the convergence and divergence of penal policies under neoliberal conditions. It shall discuss common global trends and different national and local frameworks and address their implications.
E__ POLICING CROWDS III: Social Movements after 9-11
While some authors expressed their hope that civil society will be strengthened in the aftermath of 9/11, the development of the recent years suggests that the "War on Terrorism" is used to discipline urban social movements in North America, Europe and other regions. The aggressive foreign policy of the Bush administration triggered a lot of grassroots movement activity. Simultaneously, we observe a tendency of important segments of movements to become increasingly professional (entering the NGO world) and distancing themselves from the streets into the institutional process. This leads to a loss of problem solving capacities at the grassroots levels which is which is hardly compensated by nonprofits (in the US) or state programs like Soziale Stadt in Germany. It becomes evident (i.e. the events in France during the autumn of 2005) that the coherence of the European city is not a geographical feature but needs to be maintained and (re-)produced by different social groups on a continuous basis. If the urban world is heading towards a "Planet of Slums" (Mike Davis) certain questions need to be addressed: What are the rooms to move - if any - for urban social movements between the cliffs of anti-terror-laws, the alluring promises of the NGO world and the unpredictable currents of street riots.