Marie-Eve Sylvestre (University of Ottawa - Civil Law Section) has posted Narratives of Punishment: Neoliberalism, Class Interests and the Politics of Social Exclusion (7(2) European Journal of Homelessness 363-369, 2013) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In an instructive piece, O’Sullivan challenges the grand narrative according to which the punitive turn in Europe can be explained by reference to neoliberal policies originating from the United States or to socio-economic and cultural changes associated with late modernity (e.g. Wacquant, 1999; Young, 1999; Garland, 2001; Simon, 2013). While he agrees that European countries have also adopted exclusionary measures to police, control, and incarcerate homeless people who occupy public spaces in the last decades, he suggests that such punitive measures have a long history in Europe, and that we should rather speak of varieties of punitiveness based on “distinctive cultural, historical, constitutional and political conditions” (p. 75, quoting Tonry, 2007, p.1). O’Sullivan also suggests that the adoption of punitive measures developed alongside more inclusionary measures adopted by a majority of EU member States relying on relatively generous social democratic welfare regimes. As a result, he argues that “homelessness policy is still largely driven by the politics of social inclusion rather than the politics of social exclusion” and he calls for further research in this area.
