Conflict and territory narratives: Sensitive neighbourhoods in police discourses

Mélina Germes (1)

1 Passages

While policing practices in sensitive neighbourhoods are widely researched, little of this research has studied how these spaces are thought of by the police. Discourses on space are interpretation grids that guide individual action and legitimize institutional action. This article intends to study the police discourse on sensitive neighbourhoods based on interviews conducted with national police local authorities and municipal police authorities. The formal analysis of descriptive and spatial structures demonstrates how the narrative of conflict constructs a representation of sensitive neighbourhoods in territorial terms, distinguishing the space belonging to some from that belonging to the others and delineating infringed boundaries. Second, the analysis of the discourse on the UTEQs (Unités TErritoriales de Quartier 2) shows how these spatialized antagonistic representations are used to legitimize a device, the purpose of which is control of the territory and which has an ambiguous relationship with the violence it gives rise to. The territorialization of the police discourse is inseparable from the violence of conflict, deemed as more legitimate in some spaces than in others.

Mots clés: Police; sensitive neighbourhoods; territory; UTEQ; discourse; Spatial justice

Domaines: Géographie; Architecture, aménagement de l'espace; Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences

Mélina Germes. Conflict and territory narratives: Sensitive neighbourhoods in police discourses . Justice spatiale = Spatial justice, 2011, Security Practices in Cities, 4, http://www.jssj.org/article/recits-de-conflit-et-territoire/. ⟨halshs-01518851⟩