Abstract
Foucauldian and neo-Gramscian approaches enjoy considerable influence in research on the mutations of neoliberal governance in cities. However, both are prone to treating coercion as the antithesis of power, leading them to downplay the coercive modalities of neoliberalism. This paper applies the Gramscian theory of the integral state to correct the bias towards non-coercive power. The integral state rejects the power–violence dualism, depicting coercive and non-coercive modalities of power and counter-power as inhering in capitalist political economy. The paper argues that studying neoliberalism from the perspective of the integral state contributes to explaining the intractability of coercion in the governance system and in particular the coercive power of the local state. It concludes by reflecting on the implications of this perspective for political action, arguing for a resolutely critical and conflictual stance.
Introduction
Cities have long been a vital terrain in the rollout and contestation of neoliberalism(s), as the subject of policy experimentation (Brenner and Theodore, 2002), citizen acculturation (Fuller and Geddes, 2008) and struggle (Roy, 2009). Foucauldian and neo-Gramscian studies enhance our understandings of these processes, the efficacy respectively of governmentality and attempts to construct a post-Fordist fix in cities conceived as a terrain of metagovernance. However, their common analytical bias against coercion obscures its enduring presence in the governance of urban life and as a function of the local state. Coercion remains part of the schematic ‘mix’ with hierarchies, markets and networks but is either overlooked or lurks in the background, without adequate conceptual specification. This elision is rooted in the ontology of power and violence as opposites: “where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent” (Haugaard, 2006, p. 64).
This paper argues that coercion is integral to neoliberal urban governance. It contests the power–violence dualism, arguing that coercion is a condition of rule. Accordingly it suggests that Gramsci’s theory of the integral state (coercion–consent or hegemony–domination) can contribute to a better understanding of neoliberal urban governance (Davies, 2011, 2012). The contribution to this special issue is threefold: the paper addresses the attenuated conceptions of power in governmentality and metagovernance theories by proposing a Gramscian perspective, where the local state is a key agent of coercive power; it argues that coercion is a routine condition of rule and that urban studies should thus pay greater attention to coercive power as a vehicle for governing and contesting neoliberalism(s).
The paper first discusses Foucauldian and neo-Gramscian approaches. It then develops a Marxist reading of Gramsci’s theory of the integral state and considers neoliberal urban governance from this perspective, emphasising the case for treating the modalities of coercion as integral to urban power. The paper reflects on the implications of this perspective for resisting neoliberalism. It concludes that taking the coercive capacities of the local state seriously is essential for understanding the governance of cities, particularly in a protracted period of crisis, austerity and resistance.
Foucauldian Urban Governance
The Foucauldian concept of governmentality has been particularly influential in research on the embedding of neoliberalism in the governance of city life. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault detected the emergence of bio-political power from the late 18th century, when panoptic surveillance began supplementing direct coercion in the prison system, encouraging prisoners to manage their own conduct. Discipline and Punish provides historical roots for the development of neoliberal governmentality theory, which diagnoses the evolution of governing from outright domination (discipline) to bio-political self-regulation (control) (Bang, 2011). The latter mode of governing is commonly associated with post-structuralism because, as Cerny put it (2006, p. 68), hegemony is a condition of the social system itself “not a property belonging to the hegemon”, who is no less constrained and empowered by the prevailing dispotif than subalterns. Foucauldians are thus sensitive to the relationship between governmentality and domination, but tend to treat coercion as epiphenomenal or exogenous to power. Rose (1999, p. 24), for example argued that “even terror can be a calculated instrument of government”, only to observe that “no complex analysis is required to count the costs in lies and lives of these ways of exercising power”. In his path-breaking analysis of the arts of government, he distinguishes domination, which crushes the power to act, from the art of government that is reflexive on the actions of the governed (Rose, 1999, p. 27).
This reading of power as the antithesis of coercion/domination is warranted by Foucault’s injunction to ‘cut the head off the king’, ending the philosophical preoccupation with sovereign power. Foucault argued that
Obviously the bringing into play of power relations does not exclude the use of violence any more than it does the obtaining of consent; no doubt the exercise of power can never do without one or the other, often both at the same time (Foucault, 1982, p. 789).
However, ‘consensus and violence’ do not constitute the principle or the basic nature of power which is rather a “total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions”. It is “always a way of acting upon … acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action” (Foucault, 1982, p. 789). Power does not compel; it is rather seductive.
Foucault was among the earliest theorists of neoliberalism, where the market is the governing principle not only of economic life but also the state itself. Accordingly, Foucauldian urban research is preoccupied with the cultivation of entrepreneurial rationalities, developing acute insights into the enrolment of officials and citizen-activists. Swyngedouw, for example, identified neoliberal urbanism with
a particular rationality of governing … combined with new technologies, instruments and tactics of conducting the process of collective rule-setting, implementation and often including policing as well (Swyngedouw, 2005, p. 1997).
He interpreted the cultivation of state–civil society governing networks as part of this general shift from formal to informal modalities.
Many studies of neoliberalism show governmentality at work. Carroll (2009) illustrated how the World Bank’s Kecamatan Development Programme in Indonesia sought to enhance ‘good governance’, strengthening collaboration among local state and community institutions. Carroll argued that
the KDP, drawing upon the political technology of ‘participatory development’, constitutes a distinctly different and temporarily effective delivery device for extending capitalist social relations and the institutions that the development orthodoxy posits should accompany such relations (Carroll, 2009, p. 449).
In a study of community development in Mexico, Walker et al. (2008) explored the Fundación Comunitaria de Oaxaca, an NGO administering funds from corporate benefactors. They found that the programme sought to structure communities ‘normatively’ as learners and entrepreneurs (Walker et al., 2008, p. 534), ‘rescripting’ collaborative mechanisms “as the social realm in which communities are improved through human capital acquisition” (p. 539). This is the archetypal neoliberal governmentality, although they also emphasised that ‘beneficiaries’ contest their enrolment.
In the UK, urban researchers explore how governing institutions operating ‘at a distance’ from the state (for example, Taylor, 2007), seek to enrol participants to the neoliberal goals of central and local government agencies. Watt and Jacobs (2000, p. 25) demonstrated how New Labour’s strategy for neighbourhood renewal sought to construct revitalisation as being about “more than bricks and mortar”, a framing that cultivated a bias among local state officials in favour of ‘cultural’ regeneration. In policy studies, Fuller and Geddes (2008) paint a vivid picture of how neoliberal governmentality was fostered through schemes like the Single Regeneration Budget—and later, New Deal for Communities and Local Strategic Partnerships. Like Swyngedouw, Taylor described local governing networks as a “new arena for social control” where “the rules of the game [are] still very much dictated by government” (Taylor, 2003, p. 190).
Foucault saw the state as a “schema of intelligibility for a whole set of already established institutions, a whole set of given realities” (Foucault, 2007, p. 286). However, the preceding literatures represent states as engaged in an instrumental, strategic and hierarchical struggle to cultivate neoliberal governmentality. It is represented more as a crusade against recalcitrance in and beyond the state than an amorphous, seductive property of post-structural power. Towards the end of his career, Foucault recognised that power had been
progressively governmentalized, that is to say, elaborated, rationalized, and centralized in the form of, or under the auspices of, state institutions (Foucault, 1982, p. 793).
Despite Foucault’s enduring hostility, Jessop (2007, p. 142) interpreted these reflections as moving towards a “tactical alliance” with Marxism and a partial revision of his critique of structure. Yet whether or not accommodation with Marxism is possible, the manifestations of hierarchy in Foucauldian research beg the question of what kind of state theory we require to understand the relationship between modalities of power such as governmentality, consent, authority and coercion—and modalities of resistance or counter-power (for example, Allen, 2003; Joseph, 2010; MacLeavy, 2009). Moreover, what happens when the “governable subject … fails to turn up in practice”, as is often the case (McKee, 2009, p. 474)? This paper contends that reinstating coercion to the analysis of power can reinforce Foucauldian insights.
Metagovernance Theory
Scholars recognising the need for a more robust account of the neoliberal state have turned to metagovernance theory, but without losing Foucauldian insights. For example, Uitermark (2005) saw potential for integrating Foucauldian and regulationist approaches, despite their distinct ontologies. Metagovernance theory explores the rescaling and reorganisation of states in search of post-Fordist spatio-temporal fixes. In contrast with the classic Foucauldian ontology, it posits a state capable of acting strategically, albeit with diminishing sovereign authority. With power fragmented due to processes like identity proliferation, detraditionalisation, consumerism and the upward and downward rescaling of governmental powers, it has to orchestrate rather than command. As orchestrator, the metagoverning state does not necessarily cede power but has to exercise it differently than under conditions of sovereignty. Jessop, perhaps its most influential exponent, described the metagoverning state as “less hierarchical, less centralised, less dirigiste” (Jessop, 2000, p. 24).
Metagovernance theory does not claim that coercion is redundant, but nor is it given sufficient analytical attention; perhaps because it conflates the decline of sovereign authority with the decline of coercive power. Governance rather occurs in the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ (Marsh, 2011). As for Foucault, direct coercion is “a sure sign of crisis or state failure” (Jessop, 2007: p. 4). Metagovernance theory is also sensitive to space and scale and it is notable in addition that hierarchy casts a longer shadow over some socio-spatial formations than others. Jessop and Sum, for example, argued that Gramsci’s theory of the integral state downplayed the monopoly of coercion held by sovereign states, allowing “more weight to other apparatuses, organizations and practices involved in exercising political power” (Jessop and Sum, 2005, p. 369). For metagovernance theorists, the urban governance of neoliberalism is predominantly about these other apparatuses.
According to MacLeod and Goodwin (1999), for example, the rollout of urban economic development networks in the 1980s and 1990s epitomised the rise of neoliberal metagovernance, part of the attempt to cultivate a new ‘scalar fix’ in the aftermath of Fordism. The city became an increasingly important terrain of struggle for neoliberal hegemony (also Brenner and Theodore, 2002). Influenced by post-structuralism, Pedersen et al. depict metagovernance as a form of reflexive self-management
a soft or subtle form of vertical co-ordination that does not rest on any strict hierarchical forms of regulation but gain impact through the rhetorical act of promoting a specific image of what the city is, where it comes from, and what its future might be (Pedersen et al., 2011, p. 385).
Haveri et al. (2009) develop a similar approach in their study of Finnish and Norwegian local government, where metagovernance involves four tools: policy and resource framing, institutional design, network facilitation and network participation. These tools include hierarchical authority, but coercion is epiphenomenal.
Whitehead (2003), in contrast, used the language of metagovernance ‘in the shadow of hierarchy’ to describe the rise of technocratic managerialism in urban regeneration. His research highlighted the salience of not only ‘shadow’ powers—‘frameworks and guidance’ and ‘monitoring and assessment’—but also ‘fear and discipline’; the direct application of coercion by regional officials, which local managers in turn found useful in disciplining their own ‘partners’. Whitehead here implies that coercion leverages other modalities of power, but does not follow up the theoretical implications of this insight for metagovernance. Interestingly, Vabo and Røiseland’s (2012) study of urban governance in Norway recognises that metagovernance theory pays insufficient attention to hierarchical power, suggesting that it might be reinforced by earlier literatures on the tools of government—notably Hood (1983).
In summary, the limitations of Foucauldian and metagovernance approaches are threefold: insufficient recognition of coercion as an empirical phenomenon; inadequate theorisation of the relationship between coercive and non-coercive power; and inattention to scale—the configurations of coercive and non-coercive governance in cities. Theories of urban governance need to delineate the (changing) modalities of coercive power and its relationship with consensus (bargaining, persuasion, deliberation), authority, governmentality and resistance (Allen, 2003). Gramsci’s theory of the integral state is one way forward.
Marxism, Hegemony and the Integral State
Jessop (2009, p. 80) defined governance as “the co-ordination of natural and social relations characterised by complex, reciprocal interdependence”. The focus on complexity and reciprocity arguably distinguishes neo-Gramsican from Marxist-Gramscian approaches emphasising the simultaneously totalising and dialectical processes associated with late capitalism (where ‘dialectical’ refers to a structured antagonistic relationship resolved only by the collapse or transformation of the contending parties to that relationship). Discussing Gramsci’s legacy, Jessop summarised the distinction
I question the feasibility of totalization practices and argue that they can succeed only relatively, precariously, and temporarily within specific socially constituted spatio-temporal fixes that displace and defer many contradictions, crisis-tendencies, and conflicts to marginalized places and spaces within and beyond the boundaries of this fix and/or into the future (Jessop, 2003, pp. 138–139).
As Jessop intimates, classical Marxism sees elements of the social world (such as states, markets, civil societies) as encompassed within an emerging-emergent dialectical totality (Callinicos, 2006, pp. 202–203). Marx predicted that the capitalist system would both expand across the globe and become prone to increasingly contagious crises, as returns on investment, upon which future investment depends, tend to decline. The search for profit compels capitalists both to exert downward pressure on labour costs and expand into new markets, incorporating ever-greater swathes of space–time to the capital relation. The compulsion to expand lends the system its ‘totalising’ impetus. When it encounters an intractable barrier to expansion, or finally envelops all space–time, capitalism reaches its theoretical endgame (Gramsci, 1995, pp. 429–430). Contrasted with the loosely structured, ‘weakly’ dialectical ensemble characteristic of metagovernance theory, the core of the Marxist perspective is that capitalist globalisation is simultaneously totalising, chronically unstable and thus ‘strongly’ dialectical. The compulsion to accumulate dominates the macrocosm ultimately because it causes “more problems for other systems than they can cause for it” (Jessop, 2007, p. 34). It is on this structural terrain that the diverse modalities and spatiotemporally variable configurations of power and counter-power evolve.
The present crisis has lent new credibility to the Marxist proposition that we are in “a new phase of the protracted long downturn of late capitalism” (Balakrishnan, 2010, p. 53), with its attendant implications for governing. Harvey (2011) highlighted the importance of urban capitalism in the downturn, arguing that the roots of the financial meltdown lay in the property markets and built landscapes of the city. Urban development, he claimed, is profoundly implicated in the macroeconomic crisis (Harvey, 2011, p. 5). His challenge is to
integrate an understanding of processes of urbanization and built environment formation into the general theory of the laws of motion of capital (Harvey, 2011, p. 7).
This paper is concerned with one element of Harvey’s project, the production, reproduction and contestation of (coercive) neoliberal urban governance.
Grounded in the Marxist conception of political economy as an emergent and emerging dialectical totality, the theory of the integral state complements Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, posing the question of how coercion, consensus, governmentality and authority are configured concretely in space-time, and in relation to resistance. Gramsci (1971, pp. 181–182) defined hegemony as the unity of economic and political goals, and “intellectual and moral unity … on a ‘universal’ plane”. Schematically, hegemony is comprehensive and active assent for the strategy of a governing bloc. However, hegemonic reproduction is “a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 182). Hegemony is undermined by structural instability, spatial, economic and social dispossessions and subaltern resistance spurred by asymmetries between the claims of governing regimes and lived experience. However comprehensive hegemonic power might be, it is always vulnerable to the routine and exceptional moments of instability in capitalist societies. Unlike governmentality, the struggle for hegemony “must be repeated each day” (Thomas, 2009, pp. 224–225).
Gramsci’s commitment to Marx’s political economy endured throughout his incarceration—he saw the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as the central contradiction of capitalism (Gramsci, 1995, pp. 425–435). This is not to claim structural crises as the only source of social instability, or suggest that counter-hegemonic forces do not organise without a cue from the economy; it is rather to argue that, however comprehensive capitalist hegemony may otherwise be, crises tend to undermine it by producing asymmetries between the expectations and experiences of subalterns (Anderson, 1976, p. 29). Because hegemony is precarious, the state and its sub-divisions must deploy other technologies, including coercion, if they are to maintain order.
Gramsci’s concept of the integral state offers a framework for grasping the relationship between the different modalities of power. The integral state is defined simply as ‘political society + civil society’, where political society means state coercion—the “armour of coercion” reinforces the struggle for hegemonic leadership in civil society (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 262–263). Gramsci saw the major institutions of civil society as formally autonomous, but effectively extending and sanctioning state power, which penetrates to a far greater extent under capitalism than any preceding mode of production. In Marx’s (1871) florid language: “The centralized state machinery … entoils (inmeshes) the living civil society like a boa constrictor”, through media, organised religion, education and nowadays the battalions of charitable and state-funded NGOs. Fontana (2010) argued that the more complex civil society becomes and the
more the ideological systems of belief and thought are embedded within the population, the less transparent the coercive nature of the state appears, and the more effective and consequential become the instruments of persuasion and consent (Fontana, 2010, p. 348).
Nevertheless, hegemony in civil society is guaranteed “in the last instance, by capture of the legal monopoly of violence embodied in the institutions of political society” (Thomas, 2009, p. 137). As Gramsci put it
The State is the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its domination but is also able to obtain the active consent of those over whom it rules (Gramsci, 1971, p. 244).
The idea that the state is ‘not only’ coercion, ‘but also’ consent arguably explains the disproportionate emphasis on non-coercive power in contemporary governance theory. However, the dialectical relationship between coercion and consent was fundamental to Gramsci’s conception of the integral state. He made the following distinction
[a] social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to ‘liquidate’, or subjugate, perhaps even by armed force. It leads kindred and allied groups (Gramsci, 1971, p. 57).
Hegemony and domination in Gramsci are best understood as “strategically differentiated forms of a unitary political power” (Thomas, 2009, p. 163), analytically distinct but functionally intertwined. As Gramsci commented
two things are absolutely necessary for the life of a State: arms and religion … force and consent; coercion and persuasion; State and Church; political society and civil society; politics and morality; law and freedom; order and self-discipline; … violence and fraud (Gramsci, 1971, p. 170, fn 71).
Contradictions accumulate, consent tends to be fragile and resistance causes constant friction. Artful as government is, coercion is never confined entirely to the shadows. It remains an immanent and integral condition of rule (Fontana, 2006, p. 44). As is argued later in relation to neoliberalism, displays of coercive power not only substitute for hegemony, they also reinforce and create the conditions for it.
These dialectical relationships posit structural limits to governmentality. They anticipate that the governed subject fails to appear when everyday life fosters asymmetries between an embodied ‘feel for the game’ and discordant experiences, of which cognitive and sub-conscious schemas cannot make sense. The Gramscian question is therefore not how hegemony or governmentality displaces domination, but which term of the relationship is foremost in any conjuncture.
Administrative Domination
It is important not to understate the prevalence of violence, but coercion is a broader concept. Gramsci commented that domination involved the tactics of both “military and civil coercion” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 120)—the combination of violence and administrative domination, as well as what Marx called the ‘dull compulsion’ of economic relations upon landless labourers thrown onto the labour market. “‘Direct domination’ or command” is “exercised through the State and ‘juridical’ government” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 12). In Weberian terminology, administrative domination refers to a disciplinary logic of rule; the juridical power of a state and its claim to obedience backed by force—the projection of sovereign authority as the “taken-for-granted order of things” (Ryan, 2006, p. 191) preceding governmentality. From a Gramscian perspective, administrative domination is two-sided: both a cue for obedience (sovereignty) and a range of coercive techniques for correcting disobedience, short of violence (a claim on sovereignty), notably through practices managed by the local state. Depending on state-specific divisions of labour, these include juridical enforcement, policing, incarceration, school inspection and traffic and housing management (bailiffs, traffic wardens and rent collectors). If these practices of administrative domination are recognised to be coercive, then local state coercion is arguably ubiquitous in the governance of cities. Yet, like violence, it has little analytical significance for governmentality or metagovernance theory.
Urban Neoliberalism and the Integral State
Neoliberalism rose amid the crises of Keynesianism and after. Amidst considerable diversity in form, speed and efficacy, it is distinguished by its project for extending markets, rolling back and refashioning welfare states and actively cultivating entrepreneurial rationalities through the mix of ‘inclusion’ strategies and coercion, discussed further later. As Cammack argued, neoliberalism was never merely about commodification or state rollback. Neoliberal regimes always sought to
equip the poor for their incorporation into and subjection to competitive labour markets … while simultaneously seeking to legitimate the project through participation and a pro-poor agenda’ (Cammack, 2004, p. 190).
Any project for remaking citizenship violates the free market claims of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005, p. 69). One explanation for the contradiction between neoliberal ideology and practice is the corrosive effects of “weak citizenship” on the capacity to sustain competitive advantage (Retort, 2004, pp. 9–10). Retort (2004, p. 19) argued that the shattering of institutions and traditions during the neoliberal offensive deracinated the citizenry, undermining the social cohesion and discipline that underpin competitiveness. Consequently, neoliberal states habitually intervene in ways proscribed by neoliberal ideology, seeking to cultivate hegemony.
As many scholars highlight, the city has been a central locus of political struggle. Brenner and Theodore (2002) argued that neoliberal programmes have been ‘interiorised’ into urban policy regimes, such as the rollout of World Bank ‘community governance’ programmes discussed earlier. Cities became “institutional laboratories” for “neoliberal policy experiments” (Brenner and Theodore, 2002, p. 368). To the extent that neoliberalisation has been accomplished, it often followed long, painful and highly coercive struggles. At the macro scale, Klein (2007) offered a salutary reminder of the violence invested in the rollout of neoliberalism, from the Pinochet Coup in Chile to the defeat of the miners’ strike in the UK. More recently we have seen the ferocious struggle to enforce neoliberal doctrines in southern Europe—the technocratic regimes in Greece and Italy representing the apogee of administrative domination, while the police battle against demonstrators in a ‘civil war’ on the streets with police allegedly colluding with the resurgent neo-Nazis in Athens. 1 The emergence of governmentality led Foucault to speculate about the possible “disappearance of the prison” (Foucault, 2009, p. 24), a prospect belied by spiralling incarceration rates in the UK and particularly the US throughout the neoliberal era (Lynch, 2010). Wacquant (2010) interpreted the ‘penal state’ as a ‘diligent carceral system’, integral to ‘the neoliberal Leviathan’, especially in the discipline of post-industrial precarity. In Wacquant’s account (for example, 2010, p. 200), the shift from ‘social’ to ‘penal’ management of urban marginality is a challenge to Foucauldian theories of change.
Klein’s ‘Shock Doctrine’ depicted neoliberalism viscerally as being “midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies” (Klein, 2007, p. 18). Thomas L. Friedman celebrated this dependence of neoliberalism on coercive state power
Markets function and flourish only when property rights are secured and can be enforced, which, in turn, requires a political framework protected and backed by military power … Indeed, McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the US Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps (Friedman, 2000, p. 464).
Capturing the Gramscian dialectic, Friedman recognises that, far from being antithetical to capitalist power, violence is its condition. Moreover, contrary to the orthodox power–violence dichotomy, the history of neoliberalism shows that the deployment of coercive power has had considerable efficacy, fostering conditions in which new habits and norms emerge, such that a new entrepreneurial ‘second nature’ is constructed (Fontana, 2002, p. 163). If coercion fills a void left by a failure of hegemonic leadership, it is also a strategy for uprooting and reinvention in and beyond the state, paving the way for hegemonic order.
Coercive Urban Governance
Gramsci was sensitive to the spatial modalities of hegemonic reproduction and contestation, but did not develop an explicit theory of space. As Fontana commented, he drew attention to the
importance of the relation between, on the one hand, the generation of consent, the organisation of mass opinion and, on the other, the physico-spatial and the urban-architectural structure of civil society: various types of buildings, streets and avenues, boulevards and parkways, squares and other public spaces (Fontana, 2005, p. 115).
Fontana also showed how Gramsci was inspired by Machiavelli’s contrast between the
conflict and opposition that exist in cities and in republics to the subjection and domination prevalent within the countryside. Republican liberty exists in the city precisely because of the conflict between the few and many (Fontana, 2010, p. 345).
The relationship between city and countryside is a prominent theme in the development of neoliberalism. Exploring the modern dynamics of capitalist expansion, Harvey’s analysis of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ describes the relentless state-led assault on land rights: privatisation, expulsion, the suppression of alternative modalities of production and consumption—creating a ‘landless proletariat’ forced into vast urban slums, themselves subject to brutalisation and ghettoisation on a massive scale. Where Harvey talks about the destruction of Mexico’s ‘ejidos’ system of communal farming, Arundhati Roy depicts the coercive “garrotting” of India’s rural economy (cited in Harvey, 2006, p. 49). Gramsci saw cities as the motor force of historical conflict and development. It is a terrain upon which the integral state is enacted and contested day-to-day, most viscerally in the ‘planet of slums’ (Davis, 2006); a direct corollary of the latter-day ‘enclosures’ described by Harvey and Roy.
Arguing that coercion remains a pre-condition of urban governance requires empirical clarity about what might be exceptional and what is routine, as well as the ability to distinguish spatio-temporal variations. Davis, for example, represented Middle Eastern cities as the terrain of permanent warfare
Night after night, hornet-like helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side (Davis, 2006, p. 206).
Ananya Roy’s account of the attempt to construct governmentalities in Beirut and Mumbai posed a challenge to those who see violence and coercion being substituted by governmentality, asking: can the strategy of fostering a civil governmentality
outsmart the ‘bourgeois environmentalism’… and brutal primitive violence that is unfolding in Indian cities. Can the civility of civic governmentality survive and tackle this war? (Roy, 2009, p. 177).
In Buenos Aires, a major uprising followed the neoliberal economic collapse at the end of the 1990s, leading to a wave of mass protests including factory occupations, some lasting more than a year. These occupations, conceived by some activists as a direct challenge to private property (by others as a basis for co-operative management), were subject to repeated police attacks in defence of private property, notably that of the Brukman textile workers suppressed shortly before the presidential elections of April 2003 (North and Huber, 2004).
Graham’s (2010) account of the ‘new military urbanism’ suggests that it is not only in the ‘frontier’ cities of the developing world that coercion is ubiquitous. Militarisation is also occurring in the ‘homeland’ cities of the West, organised by networks of governmental and corporate actors. Graham highlights the application of Foucauldian ‘boomerang effects’—the techniques first practised on people in ‘frontier’ cities and then applied in the governance of ‘homeland’ cities. Part of the process involves hi-tech surveillance and the governmentality effects of symbolic violence, such as through videogames. Yet Graham also noted the pervasiveness and ubiquity of direct coercion. In the ‘homeland’ cities, he pointed to boomerang effects such as the tactics for policing disorder and erecting green-zone like security apparatuses around the elite financial centres of the world, amid “pervasive low intensity conflicts” (Graham, 2010, p. 365). Graham echoes Coaffee’s work on the “contemporary fortress city” (Coaffee, 2009, p. 5) and and the rise of ‘resilience’ as a set of discourses, policies and practices oriented both to further interpolating cities with the neoliberal order and enabling investors better to assess ‘risk’.
Of particular interest in Graham’s account is the limited efficacy of these technologies. He argues that
an entire society cannot be controlled by individualised simulation and surveillance … much less an entire world (Graham, 2010, p. 364).
In other words, the hegemons are sometimes incompetent, bio-political rule fails in any case and the governance of ‘homeland’ cities is also characterised by pervasive low-intensity, and episodic high-intensity, violence. It is notable too that in ‘ungoverned spaces’, where authorities lack the requisite capability, informal coalitions of landlords, drug-dealers and ‘godfathers’ govern, using coercive power “to regulate competition and protect their investments” (Davis, 2006, p. 185). Governance as domination is not only the preserve of the state or state-authorised organisations. As Gramsci also recognised (1971, p. 266), the coercive power of the state does not mean that “‘private’ organisms and organisations do not have coercive sanctions at their disposal too, ranging even up to the death penalty”.
It was argued earlier that a crucial part of the argument for taking coercion seriously is the ubiquity of juridically authorised (if not legitimised) administrative domination. The fiscal crisis in New York exemplified the ‘shock-doctrine’ moment of administrative domination in establishing consensus for the development of a neoliberal city. According to Harvey (2005, p. 46), the Secretary of the US Treasury, William Simon ordered that the terms of any bailout for bankrupt New York should be “so punitive, the overall experience so painful, that no city, no political subdivision would ever be tempted to go down the same road” again. For Harvey, the strategy was “every bit as effective as the military coup … in Chile”, redistributing wealth “to the upper classes in the midst of a fiscal crisis” (Harvey, 2005, p. 45). The fiscal crisis was resolved not through violence, but through administrative compulsion and recrafting the local state (Wacquant, 2010). In the UK, a clash between central government and prominent Labour local authorities fighting for ‘municipal socialism’ occurred in the mid 1980s (Boddy and Fudge, 1984). Unlike the 1984–85 miners’ strike, municipal socialism was defeated primarily by administrative (juridical) fiat. In both instances, compulsion created conditions in which neoliberal sensibilities could crystallise and acquire hegemonic force, as the choice-horizons of urban leaders and activists narrowed and they acquired ‘pragmatic’ dispositions toward business-led development and financialisation.
However, administrative domination is not only exercised against the urban poor, or dissidents, it is also embedded in the everyday routines of the local state. Over and above the obvious domains of crime and policing, we have seen the rise of technocratic managerialism: intensive performance management including targets, league tables and quasi-markets fostering the coercive micro management of public services and the participatory interface between public officials and citizens. Administrative domination pervades the myriad collaborative institutions populating the urban landscape, which became important vehicles for ‘social inclusion’ across the developed and developing worlds (Geddes, 2008). Sensitivity to spatial and temporal differences is a defining feature of urban studies, but the trend towards (in Foucault’s terms) the ‘governmentalisation’ of governing networks has been widespread (Davies, 2007). For example, Hall et al. (2009, p. 527) found that in Sweden, “governance networks seem to perpetuate, rather than replace, older political and social power structures”. Guarneros-Meza (2008) discovered that participatory network governance in Mexico institutionalised bureaucratic power. In the Netherlands, Kokx and van Kempen (2010, p. 367) found that state-led micro management fosters considerable tension and frustration among local actors. Moreover, during 13 years of New Labour, the UK government promised repeatedly to devolve power to the localities, but by 2010 it had achieved the unlikely distinction of being seen as more centralising than its Tory predecessors (Davies, 2011, pp. 59–60). Much of the literature conveys this sense of disappointment in the way local authorities have sought to control and discipline participatory governance in cities.
Housing governance is another striking example of administrative domination, past and present. Hanley (2008) recorded how, in the post-war period, working-class families were uprooted in slum clearances and decanted into remote and alienating housing estates. Today, welfare cuts in the UK have led some local councils to expel disadvantaged families because they can no longer pay London rents. Families face a choice between socioeconomic dislocation with a home, or homelessness—at best a life in B&B—in London (Butler and Ferguson, 2012). Whether these practices are routine or exceptional under austerity remains to be seen. Either way, as gentrification studies have also shown, the displacement of working-class people is a routine tactic for municipal authorities, using coercive tools such as demolition, eviction and rent increases (Watt, 2013).
In summary, theories of sovereignty, governmentality and metagovernance all presume the efficacy of a particular dispotif. Each overlooks routine urban violence and the way direct administrative compulsion, of which the local state is a key agent, operates as the ubiquitous condition of rule. As the preceding discussion highlighted, coercion is deployed routinely against disadvantaged and dissident groups, but also in the everyday management of government-citizen relationships. As Fontana (2006, p. 30) put it following Machiavelli, the power–violence dualism ignores the historical fact that when leaders are able to use force, “then it is that they are rarely in peril. From this it arises that all the armed prophets conquered and the unarmed ones were ruined”. Urban power is not characteristically consensual, or an amorphous property of systems; it is exercised conflictually in coercive structure–agent relationships to which the local state is central. It is exercised as the first dimension of power, by A over B (Haugaard, 2006); yet, like hegemony itself, coercion rests on structural capacities: loyalty and discipline within the state as well as resources: infrastructure, people and weapons. Treating coercion as the antithesis of power, or as exceptional, means that a vast terrain of routine urban governmental activity is overlooked to the detriment of urban theory and our understandings of neoliberalism in cities. The challenge is to understand how the “dual nature of power: force and consent, violence and persuasion” (Fontana, 2006, p. 43) pervades cities today, but is configured and reconfigured by local states in the course of neoliberal governance and its contestation. When does it have utility for hegemony (and sovereignty), when does it substitute for hegemonic leadership and how do public officials and institutions marshal the governmental and non-governmental resources to make coercion effective under austerity conditions, or not as the case may be?
The specific configurations and trajectories of power in cities are a matter for future empirical inquiry. In a conventional scalar division of coercive labour, the military repertoire is concentrated in the state at the national and supranational scales, whereas the means of everyday administrative domination tend to be localised. Graham (2010), on the other hand, suggests a more complex division of labour with the full repertoire of hegemonic and coercive technologies converging in, over and around the city, organised by coalitions of governmental and corporate actors. At the same time, the metagovernance intuition that we are seeing more governing in the shadow of hierarchy may have greater resonance in some urban configurations than others, as might the idea of an emergent neoliberal governmentality. A better appreciation of the dialectical relationships between hierarchical, coercive, market-based, networked and bio-political modes of governing and their scalar configurations would only help to clarify these questions.
Critique and Contestation
The paper finally considers the political implications of taking coercion seriously. There is a prominent milieu across urban studies today, arguing that critical scholars should spend less time developing their diagnoses of (urban) neoliberalism and more time considering the kinds of political action that might transform it. This sentiment is prominent, variously, among everyday makers, autonomists and those who see networks or ‘affinity groups’ as vehicles for emancipatory struggle (for example, Merrifield, 2011). It is perhaps best encapsulated in Holloway’s voluntarist injunction to: “Do differently, do very differently, or there is no future for humanity” (Holloway, 2010, p. 260). Diverse in inspiration and orientation, these literatures share a concern with fostering alternatives to neoliberalism in the interstices of everyday life rather than through old-fashioned set-piece confrontations at the state level. As Swyngedouw (2007, p. 72) put it, the experimental activities of social movements exercise performative power by modifying “the map of what can be thought, what can be named and perceived, and therefore also of what is possible”. All manner of
frictions, cracks, fissures, gaps, and “vacant” spaces arise … These fissures, cracks, and “free” spaces form ‘quilting’ points, nodes for experimentation with new urban possibilities (Swyngedouw, 2007, p. 72).
Merrifield (2011) suggests that the ‘affinity group’, a fluid, sometimes fleeting and ephemeral mode of association, has the potential for cultivating these spaces. According to Jones (2008, p. 386), it is precisely the “move away from economism, capital-centrism, productivism, and essentialism in Marxist analysis” that constitutes the strength in these approaches.
This paper can be charged with all the sins Jones attributes to Marxism, but they are necessary evils. Treating state-organised coercion as epiphenomenal, or as obsolete in a world of rampant flows, is to misunderstand neoliberalism. Fraser (2012) argued in defence of critique that sacrificing it for a focus on constructive action is unlikely to bear fruit without an adequate diagnosis of the human condition. Recognising coercion as an enduring and ubiquitous dimension of power has major implications for theories of change and what might constitute effective counter-hegemonic agency. Autonomism, for example, pitches the diffuse and unstructured power of ‘Empire’ against the diffuse and unstructured counter-power of ‘Multitude’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004). Seeing informational capitalism as increasingly affective and communicative, it anticipates that Multitude will eventually overflow Empire. The power of the Multitide therefore depends on the capitalist state degenerating into a zombie category.
From the perspective of the integral state, this position is unsustainable: not only because it dispenses with any critical-realist theory of crisis but also because it renders coercion invisible as a medium of power and redundant as a modality of counter-power. If coercion is eliminated from the picture, it becomes much easier to argue that the world can be changed without any direct confrontation with state and corporate power. However, protestors, including autonomists, are only too familiar with state violence. This is why many in the Occupy movement now grapple with the problem of how to revive and sustain the creative energy of those protests while simultaneously developing a more strategic and organised perspective capable of resisting the next round of baton charges (Halvorsen, 2012).
The perspective of the integral state provides no easy answers to the question of what political agency is required to transcend urban neoliberalism. A Gramscian perspective suggests that effective counter-power must embrace dialectics, adopting an organised and resolutely confrontational and counter-coercive stance towards local and supralocal state and market institutions. The turn from ‘critique’ to ‘construction’ forcefully rejects this perspective as obsolete, and because it supposedly induces political paralysis. However, Harvey with Wachsmuth concluded that
capitalism will never fall on its own. It will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capital will never cease. It will have to be stopped. The capitalist class will never willingly surrender its power. It will have to be dispossessed. To do what has to be done will require tenacity and determination, patience, and cunning, along with fierce political commitments born of moral outrage at what exploitative compound growth is doing to all facets of life, human and otherwise, on planet earth (Harvey with Wachsmuth, 2011, p. 274).
It is notable that political theory has also begun to re-engage the problem of coercion; on the one hand as a legitimate and necessary condition of rule (Frazer and Hutchings, 2011) and on the other as a legitimate and necessary modality of counter-power (Medearis, 2005). The task of how to mobilise counter-hegemonic force alongside counter-hegemonic discourse looms large. It does not entail abandoning everyday struggles, transgressive performances and spectacles, or other purportedly novel tactics. Yet, without confronting and disassembling coercive power from the locality upwards, it is hard to see how alternative political economies can be sustained at any scale.
Conclusion
Foucauldian, neo-Gramscian and orthodox Gramscian understandings of urban governance are distinguished by the centrality of coercion in the latter approach. The main theoretical argument is that, amidst spatio-temporally mutative processes of neoliberalisation and contestation, urban modalities of coercive power are ever-present and merit far greater attention than they are accorded in Foucauldian and neo-Gramsican studies. Moreover, despite the seemingly overweening hegemonic power of neoliberalism globally, fissures, tensions and contradictions also mean that neoliberal regimes appear prone to ‘backsliding’ from hegemony towards domination, whether this is expressed in the form of violence or roll-forward administrative domination. If this conclusion seems pessimistic, recall that Gramsci saw coercion as a moment not only of hegemony but also resistance and counter-power. Coercion maybe used, but this does not mean it is necessarily effective in the face of counter-hegemonic mobilisation, or indeed everyday refusals by citizens unwilling or unable to internalise the rules of the neoliberal game.
Ultimately, the value of the theory of the integral state as a lens for understanding the dialectics of power and resistance will be determined only through empirical research and political practice; but this paper argues that it draws attention and contributes to explaining pervasive and routine enactments of coercion in neoliberal urban governance. A key challenge for future comparative studies is to develop historically grounded understandings of how urban governance serves, or fails to serve, the ends of neoliberal hegemony, the variable role of the local state in the struggle, and what the dialectics of coercion–consent and resistance reveal about the potential for transformations. This is an urgent task for critical urban studies in a devastating and enduring international crisis.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Mike Geddes, the Guest Editors of this special issue and anonymous referees for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.