Government Rationales and the Territorial Stigmatization of the Danish Ghetto

Government rationales and the territorial stigmatization of the Danish ghetto Thesis Spring, 2019 Ida Ries Waaddegaard Student-ID: 20163137 Supervisor: Steffen Jensen Submission date: May 31st 2019 Characters: 135.586 Global Refugee Studies Department of Culture and Global studies Aalborg University, Copenhagen 1 Table of Content ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................................................ 3 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................... 4 THESIS AIMS, PURPOSE AND RESEARCH QUESTION ................................................................................................ 5 DEEPENING OF AIMS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS ........................................................................................................................ 6 THE POLICY UNDER SCRUTINY .................................................................................................................................................. 7 SUMMARY AND STRUCTURE OF THESIS ....................................................................................................................................10 CHAPTER 1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY ............................................................................ 11 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................................................................11 THE TRADITION OF POSTSTRUCTURALISM ................................................................................................................................11 DISCURSIVE APPROACH TO POLICY ANALYSIS ............................................................................................................................12 GOVERNMENTALITY; GOVERNANCE AND POWER .......................................................................................................................14 TERRITORIAL STIGMATIZATION ..............................................................................................................................................15 WHAT’S THE PROBLEM REPRESENTED TO BE? AS METHOD ........................................................................................................16 DATA COLLECTION AND EMPIRICAL MATERIAL...........................................................................................................................19 MY EMPIRICAL MATERIAL OF ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH.............................................................................................................19 CHAPTER 2. ........................................................................................................................................................ 22 THE CONSTRUCTION OF GHETTO AND PARALLEL SOCIETIES ................................................................................. 22 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................................................................22 FOUR CORE REPRESENTATIONS OF ‘PROBLEMS’ IN THE 2030 STRATEGY ........................................................................................24 1. PARALLEL SOCIETIES AS CORE PROBLEMATIZATION .................................................................................................................25 2. ‘NON- WESTERN BACKGROUND’ AS CORE PROBLEMATIZATION ................................................................................................28 3. ‘BAD PARENTING’ AS CORE PROBLEMATIZATION ....................................................................................................................29 4. ‘UNSAFE AND CRIMINAL AREAS’ AS CORE PROBLEMATIZATION .................................................................................................31 SUMMARY OF CHAPTER .......................................................................................................................................................33 CHAPTER 3. ASSUMPTIONS AND RATIONALES IN THE 2030 STRATEGY .................................................................. 34 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................................................................34 FORMS OF GOVERNANCE – A NEOLIBERAL RATIONALITY AND NOTIONS OF UNIVERSALISM .................................................................34 THE INDIVIDUALIZATION OF RESPONSIBILITY .............................................................................................................................35 SOCIAL EXCLUSION OF WELFARE-RECIPIENTS ............................................................................................................................38 THE TERRITORIAL STIGMATIZATION OF THE GHETTO ...................................................................................................................39 THE ANTAGONISM OF THE GHETTO VS. DANISH SOCIETY .............................................................................................................40 CHAPTER 4. PERSPECTIVES FROM THE GHETTO ................................................................................................... 43 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................................................................43 PARALLEL SOCIETIES ............................................................................................................................................................43 MICRO-LEVEL EFFECTS OF DISCURSIVELY CONSTRUCTED SUBJECTS ................................................................................................44 UNWANTED AREAS OR SAFE NEIGHBORHOODS .........................................................................................................................45 BAD PARENTING? ...............................................................................................................................................................47 THE CASE OF EMAN.............................................................................................................................................................48 THE INTERNALIZATION OF THE STIGMA – THE SECOND-G ...........................................................................................................50 CRIMINAL ACTIVITY .............................................................................................................................................................51 DISCURSIVE DOMINANCE......................................................................................................................................................52 SUMMARY OF CHAPTER .......................................................................................................................................................53 CONCLUSIONS .................................................................................................................................................... 54 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................................... 57 2 ABSTRACT This thesis arises out of an interest in political power and forms of governance expressed within the Government strategy “A Denmark without parallel-societies – no ghettos in 2030”. This strategy is the most far-reaching to be presented since the first in 1994 because of its explicit goal of a total eradication of ghettos by 2030. The significance of the strategy against so-called ‘parallel societies’ has been widely criticized both in the media, nationally, and internationally, and from various fields within the academics, despite a broad political consensus. I aim at conducting a critical policy analysis of the strategy to explore and in depth examine embedded government rationales and conceptual logics. I’m interested in how polities discursively construct certain issues as particular kinds of ‘problems’ through representations of problems. This analysis is utilized with the What’s the problem represented to be? –approach (WPR) developed by Carl Bacchi. I further examine imbedded government rationales and logics through a Governmentality- perspective presented by Michel Foucault and to supplement the critical policy analysis the thesis further examines processes of territorial stigmatization and examine how the political rationale and conceptual logics resonate with research from the ghetto areas. The study argues that the government strategy constructs a discourse of the Danish ghetto areas as unwanted unsafe place, which are characterized by problems of a failed integration. The government strategy articulates a dominant discourse of the Danish ghetto areas having massive challenges with parallel societies, counter-cultures, irresponsible parents, crime and violence because of ethnicity; explicitly individuals with a non-western background. Through a critical discussion of data material from three ethnographic studies, I challenge the government discourse and these taken- for granted assumptions and present concrete examples from everyday life in the ghetto which reflect a more nuanced and complex picture of the lives in the ghettos. Keywords: WPR, Governmentality,

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