Civic Governmentality: The Politics of Inclusion in Beirut and Mumbai

Abstract:  This article is concerned with the politics of inclusion. It analyzes the institutionalization of participatory citizenship as the formation of regimes of "civic governmentality". Through the study of key civil society organizations such as SPARC and Hezbollah, it studies three dimensions of civic governmentality: an infrastructure of populist mediation; technologies of governing (for example, knowledge production); and norms of self-rule (for example, concepts of civility and civicness). However, such regimes of civic governmentality operate within frontiers of urban renewal and indeed often facilitate and manage such types of development. The article examines the limits and contradictions of the politics of inclusion in the context of the bourgeois city and also studies radical forms of citizenship that emerge to challenge these limits.