Introduction

This conceptualization of ‘the social’ has a much longer history than some of the others that this collection considers. We most often trace the concept of social cohesion back to Émile Durkheim’s 1893 work, The Division of Labor in Society. Writing at the end of a century of immense social change in Europe and mounting political uncertainties in both national states and transnational empires, Durkheim worried about the consequences of economic and social transformations for the capacity of societies to cohere as well as the social mechanisms permitting that to happen. Recently, however, academic and policy analysts have located the concept in the work of an even earlier theorist. As explicit preoccupation with social cohesion in post-colonial and post-conflict settings has mounted, the tendency has been to retrieve the position of Ibn Khaldun. He developed the concept of asabiyyah (solidarity or cohesion) in his 14th century masterwork of historical sociology, Muqaddimah (Khaldun, 1958 [1377]). Albeit separated by half a millennium, both these social theorists sought the social processes and mechanisms that allowed societies to cohere even as social, economic and political conflicts or instability reshaped them. As this chapter describes and assesses, this concern for cohesive social relations during crisis and change continues to motivate both actions and analysis of institutions and actors now intervening at several scales, including global social policy.

‘Social cohesion’: a quasi-concept

Social cohesion is a concept that has always operated at the intersection of intervention and analysis. Indeed, it respects the definition of a quasi-concept: a hybrid, making use of empirical analysis and thereby benefiting from the legitimizing aura of the scientific method, but simultaneously characterized by an indeterminate quality that makes it adaptable to a variety of situations and flexible enough to follow the twists and turns of policy that everyday politics sometimes make necessary (Bernard, 1999: 48). Varied policy communities working at numerous scales invoke the quasi-concept. Social cohesion is analysed in local communities and across regions. Supranational and international organizations as well as national institutions adopt a lens they label social cohesion. The disciplinary variety is also immense, ranging from sociology and economics to psychology and epidemiology. When observers are fearful of ‘crisis’ they tend to invoke the conditions of social cohesion, with the result that its (dreaded) absence receives more consideration than the characteristics of its presence.