Geography Lecture Series

Broken Windows Policing and the Geopolitics of Ungoverned Space
Co-hosted with Political Science

Dr. Katharyne Mitchell, Professor and Chair
Department of Geography, University of Washington

New geopolitical concerns involve the control of ungoverned space and the effective administration of populations. In this paper, I investigate the broken windows language of danger and disorder, and also some of the specific technical practices of broken windows policing through which a sense of order and effective entrepreneurial governance is transmitted. By tracing the path of broken windows discourse and technical practices from New York to Iraq, I further document some of the specific technologies and players through which ideas such as these can travel and become institutionalized globally. I argue finally that broken windows policing, as an imaginative geographical and geopolitical scripting of the perils of chaotic and ungoverned space, helps to produce new forms of governance through security, which at the same time facilitates the formation and entrenchment of neoliberal practices and subjectivities worldwide.

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Geography, Manoa Campus

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Stacy Jørgensen, 808-956-7526, jorgy@hawaii.edu

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