Introduction

This chapter sketches Loïc Wacquant's key arguments about the neoliberal state project and advanced marginality with particular reference to the impact of these processes on racial and minority ethnic groups and the neighbourhoods in which they are concentrated in advanced societies. It notes criticisms of this position, and while acknowledging strengths in Wacquant's attempts to bring together materialist Marxist and cultural, neo-Durkheimian perspectives, it is argued that in practice there is an over-reliance on materialist assumptions that depict social actors primarily as economic actors in the last instance. The chapter provides an alternative perspective, developed by this author in a series of publications, rooted in a revisionist interpretation of governmentality perspectives. This highlights a broadened conception of sovereignty, understood not as a structure but as a series of interrelated processes deployed to secure control and legitimation of nation-states. These range from coercive practices to the struggle for different forms of security – from food security to nationbuilding strategies and technologies. This perspective does not primarily view people as economic actors; indeed it views economic relations and practices as politically and culturally constructed. Hence sovereign nation-state practices in relation to minority groups are not always or primarily best understood in terms of notions of advanced economic marginality. They are also bound up with contested attempts to create and reproduce both ethnic and civic forms of national citizenship at different spatial scales, from local to national. This perspective also highlights that attempts to enact sovereign governance ‘from above’ always interact with forms of territorial governance by myriad groups and sites of governance ‘from below’. These may include a range of religious, ethnic, racially or spatially defined and based groupings.

Wacquant's originality

Through a series of publications, Wacquant argues that we need to broaden our conception of neoliberalism from a narrow focus on economic policies promoting the virtues of lightly regulated markets over state activity, towards a more sociological conception (see, for example, Wacquant, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2011). This recognises that, given the painful, destabilising effects of the international agenda of neoliberal policies, there is a functional need for interdependent linkages between strategies of ‘state-craft’ – state-orchestrated economic and social controls. In addition to economic policies these include tough, punitive modes of policing, criminal justice and punishment, along with a shift away from state-funded welfare benefit safety-nets for the poor towards more conditional ‘workfare’ policies.