Cheikh Khaled Bentounès: l’ouverture, la solidarité, le partage – vers une culture de paix

Since 1975 Cheikh Bentounès has been the spiritual guide of the Alawiyya tariqa, founded in 1909 in Mostaganem, Algeria, by Cheikh Ahmed Al-Alawi, whose values of tolerance, peace and interreligious dialogue are known internationally. Living in Europe, the Cheikh navigates complex spaces and borders (Morocco, Algeria and France), advocating for a more harmonious relation to our environment. This article examines the concepts and projects he puts forward through his writings and the International Day of Living Together in Peace that he obtained from the United Nations in 2017. It evokes as well the views of rapper and writer Abd Al Malik on the importance of his approach (he refers to his personal experience growing up in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in France), and draws a parallel to the concepts of Senghor, first president of Senegal, on the interweaving of cultures – explained by the work of Soulemane Bachir Diagne through the influences of Bergson and Iqbal. Khalid Zekri’s analyses shed light on the historical, social and cultural context. In a world where consumerism (excessive notion of commodification) and divisions play an important role, Cheikh Bentounès reminds us of the need to shift our rapport to the world to better face problems that have arisen, including ecological disasters, before it is too late. We are reminded through the clarity of his words (power of orality) that humanism is an urgent necessity for our survival.

Can subsidies paid directly to employers reduce residential discrimination in employment? An assessment based on serial field experiments

‘Emplois Francs’ is a new public policy in France that provides financial assistance to companies when they hire a jobseeker living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood. This study evaluates the effect of this policy by using three waves of correspondence tests spaced six months apart to measure discrimination in access to employment based on ethnic origin and place of residence. We find a substantial level of discrimination based on ethnic origin and a lower level of residential discrimination. We find that the programme decreases residential discrimination after six months, but we cannot conclude that the effect is still present 12 months later.

Housing, crises and crime

A disappointment of responses to the Covid-19 crisis is that governments have not invested massively in public housing. Global crises are opportunities for macro resets of policy settings that might deliver lower crime and better justice. Justice Reinvestment is important, but far from enough, as investment beyond the levels of capital sunk into criminal justice is required to establish a just society. Neoliberal policies have produced steep declines in public and social housing stock. This matters because many rehabilitation programmes only work when clients have secure housing. Getting housing policies right is also fundamental because we know the combined effect on crime of being truly disadvantaged, and living in a deeply disadvantaged neighbourhood, is not additive, but multiplicative. A Treaty with First Nations Australians is unlikely to return the stolen land on which white mansions stand. Are there other options for Treaty negotiations? Excellence and generosity in social housing policies might open some paths to partial healing for genocide and ecocide.

Neighbourhoods, networks and unemployment: The role of neighbourhood disadvantage and local networks in taking up work

We bring together research on social networks and neighbourhood disadvantage to examine how they jointly affect unemployed individuals’ probability of re-entering employment. Data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study ‘Understanding Society’ provide information on the proportion of friends who live in the same neighbourhood, and are linked with small-scale administrative information on neighborhood employment deprivation. Results indicate that neighbourhood employment deprivation prolongs unemployment, but only for individuals who report that all of their friends live in the same neighbourhood. Living in an advantaged neighbourhood with all of one’s friends in the neighbourhood increases the chances of exiting unemployment. In contrast, neighbourhood location is not associated with unemployment exit if one’s friends do not live in the same neighbourhood. We conclude that neighbourhood effects on exiting unemployment critically depend on individuals’ social embeddedness in the neighbourhood. Not just residing in a disadvantaged neighbourhood, but actually living there with all one’s friends, prevents individuals from re-entering employment. This opens new avenues for theorising neighbourhood effects as social rather than geographic phenomena, and highlights that the effects of neighbourhood socio-economic characteristics are conditional on the level of interaction residents have within their neighbourhood.

On the perpetuation and contestation of racial stigma: Urban Roma in a disadvantaged neighbourhood of Szeged

Stigmatisation of Roma people has long received attention in the academic literature but the internalisation of stigma among segregated urban Roma has been little researched. By adopting a theoretical perspective on collective identity and (urban Roma) racial stigmatisation, this paper aims to 1) understand the broader nature of urban Roma stigmatisation maintained by the non-Roma people and among the Roma, and 2) better position the internalisation of stigma and the burden of Roma stigmatisation. The paper uses Participatory Action Research (PAR) as a research methodology, taking a disadvantaged neighbourhood of the city of Szeged, Hungary as a case study. The findings suggest that stigmatisation against urban Roma is a process which has deeply rooted historical backgrounds, and current efforts which strive for desegregation and integration of urban Roma will be difficult to implement , as stigmatisation remains in the collective mentality. The importance of this study rests on bringing all major dimensions of stigma together, highlighting what policymakers should consider when addressing them in the longer term. We argue that the existing urban policies towards the Roma people need to be readdressed, with clear power given to the voices of the Roma, particularly from institutions which aim to protect them.

‘Planning’, ‘Searching’ and ‘Drifting’: Labour market transitions in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in a rich city in Scotland

This paper draws on desk-based and empirical research which examined experiences of young people in Pilton, a disadvantaged neighbourhood in Edinburgh, as they entered the labour market. At odds with contemporary discourses that suggest the existence of a ‘culture of worklessness’, finding and maintaining employment was regarded by almost all the young people in this study as an important marker of adult identity and self-efficacy. Indeed, young people expressed stoical views about their determination to find stable, long-term work. Nonetheless, structural inequalities presented significant barriers to achieving and maintaining long-term, stable employment, with support services being regarded by young people and professionals alike as inadequate. However, young people tended to believe that they were personally responsible for lack of success in the labour market context and this can harm their well-being at a crucial period of transition. This research challenges discourses that characterise and pathologise disadvantaged young people as ‘work shy’ and indicates that, instead, many young people are required to have extraordinary resilience as they persevere to try to gain and maintain stable paid employment. The concept of ‘social exclusion’ is rejected in describing these young people's contexts; they are not ‘outside’ society and in fact they have rich and varied social experiences. However, they are severely disadvantaged by structural inequalities within the labour market.

‘I call it the dark side’: Stigma, social capital and social networks in a disadvantaged neighbourhood

It is well established that the stigmatisation of residents of socio-economically disadvantaged places by outsiders can have harmful consequences for those residents’ wellbeing and opportunities. However, relatively little research examines the effects of intra-neighbourhood stigmatisation on residents. We draw on Loïc Wacquant’s ‘advanced marginality’ thesis to explore this dynamic. We extend Wacquant’s concept of ‘territorial stigmatisation’ empirically with a social and spatial analysis of relational ties and stigma in a disadvantaged neighbourhood in Tasmania, Australia. This shifts the analytical focus from insider–outsider boundary-making to the ‘micro-territories’ of stigma production, which we argue are relationally as well as geographically constituted.