International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 130
Underestimating the Political Dimension in Urban and Geopolitical Violence
in these strictly imaginary conditions, the supposedly reactive sentiment turns out
to be political, in the sense of the identity of affiliation to what is not only a religion
being violated. It is not therefore a psychological but political humiliation, in the
sense of the warrior being able to take up the gauntlet because a grenade rolling on
one’s soil (that of the mosque) is equivalent to a casus belli that demands not civil
apologies but in fact diplomatic ones, since Islam is unique in its legal connection
between both religion and political system and personal and social life. This does
not mean that all actors experience their relationship to the Islamic religion in the
same way, particularly if it is a distant one, but it still represents an aspect of identity
that is reinforced by the surrounding doxa, which overvalues it to the detriment
of integration with French identity. This is already materialized in a lack of respect
for institutions: as Lucienne Bui Trong (2003, 37) indicates, neighborhoods with
the same unemployment rate, but a much lower rate of immigration, have a much
less violent relationship to institutions. Yet for Mucchielli et al., this observation is
instead perceived as originating solely in “stigmatization” (Mucchielli et al. 2007,
170) before they substitute this with the sociological and psychosociological dimensions
of “exclusion” (Mucchielli et al. 2007, 164) and present “humiliation” as
an explanatory primate/prism:
It is as if in fact the need to have the injustice of one’s situation of
humiliation globally recognized overrides even the anger of having
experienced a particular form of exclusion, discrimination, or violence
(Mucchielli et al. 2007, 163).
I do not of course seek to downplay the genuine integration problems that
are in part also related to the disconnect from systems of education and training,
amid a particular techno-urban and media environment that gives a radio presenter
much more symbolic “weight” than a teacher, or emulating dancing in a
nightclub much more weight than school sports in which nothing is at stake, even
if they are compulsory. 34 Nor to “stigmatize” by establishing ad hoc correlations
between religion, culture, and violence. I do however want to confront an identity-based
malaise that originates in a conflict of belonging for which the problem
is also never in oneself but always and only in the other (police officer, bus driver,
Jew, etc.).
Certainly, some young people mention difficulties at school, which may be
of various kinds. First, it should not be forgotten that a confusion between intelligence
and education makes all uneducated (and thus unqualified) people consider
themselves to be idiots, and this can only foster “hatred” among some toward
those who succeed, as an initial example, in exams. School-based violence is the
most flagrant symptom of this, and now extends to attacks on young high school
34 Which would of course require other field studies, of which this article attempts to consider the
initial stages.
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