International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 116

Underestimating the Political Dimension in Urban and Geopolitical Violence
a rationalization of practices and views that are largely established
independently of it (Bacqué and Sintomer 2001, 222).
But when the authors go on to observe that disaffiliation—in their view
the result of precarity and the loss of credibility of the spirit of division (Bacqué
and Sintomer 2001, 222)—does not engender anomie but the conflict of norms
(Bacqué and Sintomer 2001, 234), they seem to present this latter solely in terms
of the power relations between “majoritarian” and “deviant” norms. But it is also
and above all dependent on the circumstances of a conflict between, on the one
hand, constitutive norms that embody the axiological and deontological values
necessary to the morphology of a sociality, and on the other hand, divisive norms,
i.e. those that symbolize a demand for the recognition of status that would stem
from political recognition. In other words, the divisive political demand is not
simply “civic”—for example in the demand for “participatory democracy” (Bacqué
and Sintomer 2001, 240)—since its ideocratic/utopian or even theological/political
dimensions could lead to the violent imposition of a counter-society, which
could become a pole of attraction that eventually destabilizes the sociality of the
morphology in question, if only at the micro level of a particular neighborhood,
street, or building.
Thus, when the authors ask questions such as “How do some troublemakers
have a building, or even neighborhood, ‘under their thumb’? Why is the neighborhood
unable to spontaneously bring an end to such behavior?” (Bacqué and Sintomer
2001, 233), they dismiss the idea that “the explanation” for such an inability
is based “on an illegal mafia-type structure, in which the population is trapped in
the net of organized crime by fear and clientelism ( ... ).” They suggest instead that:
the latent fear of some residents can only be understood if we perceive
that the handful of individuals committing the most serious acts of
vandalism represent merely the tip of the iceberg of a larger group of
young people who to some extent share their values and attitudes.
The problem that some young people (that is, the majority of them,
not simply the most “hardcore”) pose to the other residents in general
is not that they are acting outside the norm, but in accordance
with other norms, which sometimes stand in such opposition to the
dominant norms that they are unacceptable and incomprehensible to
those who obey the latter. Rather than anomie, we should therefore
speak of deviant norms and conflicts of norms. Taken to the extreme,
the deviant norm makes integration into the rest of society without
conflict almost impossible (Bacqué and Sintomer 2001, 234).
But this explanation is limited solely to the nomological framework of the
constructivist paradigm of social norms. It proposes the idea of norms that are
deviant not in relation to the moral law of ought that is in some ways embodied by
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