Interculturalism, insecurity and neoliberal passions: a central police presence in the ordinary construction of insecure living together in Las Margaritas and La Alhóndiga (Getafe) from 2016 to 2018

Abstract

This paper highlights the crucial significance of the local police as an obstacle to the development of intercultural living together policies in Las Margaritas and La Alhóndiga from 2016 to 2018. The police would contribute, in fact, to the construction of an insecure coexistence, characterized by nurturing a specifically neoliberal way of governing social insecurity. This form of government is not at all committed to reducing inequality in various socio-protective dimensions, but rather (re)articulates powerful images that generate penultimate passions (the rejection, avoidance, and fear of vulnerable social groups), thus legitimizing surveillance and punishment. As such, it contributes to the creation in vulnerable collectives of the kind of insecurity that has been embodied throughout history and which traverses all sociopolitical struggles. The local police force in Getafe plays a key role in these processes without crossing the line into the use of violent techniques, embodying as it does a procedural subtlety as complex as it is heterogeneous. In fact, the final reflections in this paper address a critical review of what was previously analyzed to propose an analytical turn towards an affective-experiential phenomenology.