Staden, våldet och tryggheten : Om social ordning i ett mångkulturellt samhälle

Sammanfattning: The question of social order often arises during periods of social change. In the late-modern, multicultural, and urbanized societies of today, the question is often posed of how to create order in a society attempting to combine cultural diversity and social cohesion.Drawing on theories within political philosophy, social theory, and urban sociology this thesis elaborates a viewpoint on what should characterize a sound social order. Such a social order is characterized by its meeting people’s needs for cultural belonging, personal identity, and social integration. Liberal, communitarian, and discourse-ethical perspectives are discussed, and of the three, discourse-ethics is found to be the one most suited for handling the problems of social order in today’s late-modern, multicultural, and urbanized society.The view of social order found in the Swedish National Programme for Crime Prevention is then analysed. Of special interest is the view of human beings, society, and the importance of values for social cohesion that is found in the crime-prevention programme. Apart from this descriptive-analytic goal, the study also has a normative-constructive one: to evaluate the sustainability of this viewpoint and discuss how the work of crime prevention can be designed to better fit with a sustainable view of society, the human being, and the importance of values.From the perspective that a sound social order is characterized by its meeting people’s needs for cultural belonging, personal identity, and social integration, and that there are competing conceptions of what characterizes a good society, this study argues that the crime-prevention programme ought to have a deliberative approach, with a strong emphasis on the importance of transboundary interaction, intercultural communication, and social friction. Hence the work of crime prevention should be as much about learning to handle one’s insecurity, as about creating security.