International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 126

Underestimating the Political Dimension in Urban and Geopolitical Violence
II
The November 2005 Riots
It should first be noted that statistics do not show that quantitatively perceptible
levels of unemployment and deprivation automatically produce violence. 27
However, the majority of sociologists 28 —due to a hidden bias toward the automatic
overdetermination of socioeconomic factors rather than politico-cultural
and religious symbolic factors—systematically privilege these factors and thus
immediately separate the political dimension, often reduced to an emotional reaction
linked to a feeling of humiliation, from the specific meaning of identity-based
malaise reported above, or the crisis of affiliation to French identity (recently embodied
by whistling during the Marseillaise): items that elude empirical studies,
which are in any case steered in advance to elude them. In other words, on the
one hand, such studies reduce these problems of identity-based malaise, linked to
the ambivalence previously described, to their uniquely socioeconomic aspects.
On the other hand, they explain them by reducing the social relationship to institutional
“symbolic violence,” thus following the paradigm derived from Foucault
and Bourdieu that presumptively reduces synthetic concepts of power and institutions
solely to the aspects of conditioning and repression. 29
Thus, in a collective work, the various authors persistently and insistently
reduce the political motivation of actors to a reaction, an “emotion” (Mucchielli et
al. 2007, 160). They fail to see it as a symptom of an identity-based dimension that
expresses itself in attempts to appropriate certain elements of power (authority
and strength). It is a symptom that wants to embody these latter, in addition to
and in the place of the legally appointed agents. For example, they speak of “their”
territory in relation to “urban violence,” which this article qualifies according to
the “eight-degree” classification set out by Lucienne Bui Trong (2000, 63) as acts
indicating a capacity for “collective, provocative, and destructive” mobilization (Bui
Trong 2000, 73). These are quite different from acts designed to “seize the goods
of the other, for personal use” (Bui Trong 2000, 73). Bui Trong also explores how
the concept of “territory” is used, stating on the one hand that when taken at face
27 This is argued for example by Lucienne Bui Trong (2003, 37), who has shown that in neighborhoods
with the same unemployment rate, the relationship to violence varied depending on whether
the mediatory role of institutions was still accepted, with their presence and actions not understood
according to the Foucaultian/Bourdieusian paradigm (Oulahbib 2002; 2003; 2006), as
coercion stemming from a social and moral order that sought to bring into line the social issue, but
rather as the embodiment of values and skills structured in institutions at a given social historic
moment.
28 Such as Laurent Mucchielli, Laurent Bonelli, Stéphane Beaud, and Michel Pialoux (2007).
29 Oulahbib 2002; 2003; 2006.
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