Threatening the Social Order

Abstract

One of the most productive loci for the analysis of the security – morality nexus is the making of security laws and norms which reveals the ways in which the social order is perceived to be under threat. This article argues for a critical examination of the moralities underlying the security paradigm, or else ‘the securitarian moral assemblage’, through the example of how the Roma are targeted by security laws, decrees, and measures in Rome. Moral values underpinning the social order become particularly visible in security laws, as these laws betray that which requires enhanced protection, and what is seen to produce the existential danger that jeopardizes the status quo. Taking a closer look at the practices that are framed as morally dubious and increasingly repressed and controlled helps us make sense of the moral underpinnings that serve the reproduction of a social order presaged upon exacerbated consumption and the production of inequalities. Such an approach goes beyond merely illuminating the dynamics of exclusion grounded in the racialization and discrimination to which the Roma are undoubtedly subjected. It establishes a link between the explosion of security narratives, practices, and measures, and the larger contemporary context of capitalism and the current protracted crisis that it has engendered.

Race Matters: The Materiality of Domopolitics in the Peripheries of Rome

“…They would bring to the neighbourhood not only unfamiliarity, but also morally contestable practices visible through their materiality, and a sense of disorder which disrupts visions and intimacies of ‘the home’. Drawing upon Mary Douglas's ([1966] 1991) conceptualization of matter out of place as an embodiment of danger, I have analysed elsewhere the entanglements between people and matter out of place in the urban space (Ivasiuc, 2015), as well as the notions of order and disorder paralleling the notions of ‘we’ versus ‘them’ that underlie domopolitical rationalities (Ivasiuc, 2018).…”

“…Neighbourhood patrolling is a socio‐spatial securitization practice that testifies to the ‘increasing penetration of the logic of securitization in the domestic and private realm of the home’ (Low, 2017: 366). While such practices are common in the United States, over the last few years they have proliferated in Europe too (Ivasiuc, 2018). Contradicting the claim of the patrol that they seek to bestow security on Ponte di Nona, the circulation and multiplication of tropes and visual constructions of danger produces rather than combats insecurity; it traces domopolitical boundaries between racialized others and the material effects of their presence in the neighbourhood on the one hand, and those perceived to be legitimate residents of the neighbourhood because white and middle‐class on the other.…”

“…2 2 I have described more extensively the practices of the patrol elsewhere (Ivasiuc, 2015), and I have also examined the cultural and material conditions of their emergence in another recent article (Ivasiuc, 2018). …”