External Intimacy: Community-based Intervention Concerning Crime and the Integral State in Quebec

This article deals with the contradictory way in which community-based intervention concerning crime relates to political domination and to the institutions of the State in Quebec, Canada by exploring the pertinence of the Gramscian conception of civil society. Surprisingly, although Antonio Gramsci offers an interesting set of concepts for the study of the relationship between civil society and government institutions, his ideas have rarely been used to understand community intervention in general and that related to public security in particular. Gramscian concepts such as civil society, political society, hegemony, and the integral State strike us as particularly useful in this regard. In our opinion, they offer a much more comprehensive view of the current relationship between community action (civil society) and the criminal justice system (the government) than narratives that insist on the alleged autonomy of civil society and on the weakening of the State. To show the utility of these concepts, we used them to understand community tensions related to racially discriminatory practices by police officers in the multiethnic borough of Montréal-Nord in Montreal.