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The purpose of this paper, which follows an earlier paper published in this journal, is to explore the shape and nature of plural policing through the lens of New Right ideology. It aims to reinforce the understanding that policy is driven by both neoliberalism and neoconservatism, not simply the former. In policy terms, it uses the vehicle of a faith-based initiative – the Street Pastors – to consider how the strategic line of plural policing may be shifting.

The research that informs this paper spans 2012 to the present day incorporating a multi-method evaluation, an ongoing observation with informal interviews, and two e-mail surveys directed at university students in Plymouth and Cardiff. In addition, the authors carried out a critical analysis of a research report produced by van Steden and a documentary analysis of national newspaper reports of Street Pastor activities.

In a previous paper, the authors provided evidence to support the contention of Jones and Lister (2015) that there has been a shift in the landscape of plural policing. The Street Pastors initiative is a movement from “policing by the state” towards “policing from below”. The authors suggest here that there may be evidence to speculate that another shift might occur from “policing from below” to “policing through the state”. Ultimately, the authors contend, such shifts reflect and serve the dominance of New Right ideology in social and public policy.

The research limitations of this paper are twofold. First, the surveys had very small sample sizes and so the results should be treated with caution. The authors have underlined this in detail where necessary. Second, it is informed by a series of related though discrete research activities. However, the authors regard this as a strength also, as the findings are consistent across the range. The implications relate to the way in which policy designed to encourage partnership might lead to off-loading public responsibilities on the one hand, while allowing co-option on the other hand.

The practical implications are indivisible from the social implications in the authors’ view. The neoliberal and neoconservative dimensions of the current dominant ideology are using local initiatives to save public money and reify disciplinary features of social and public policy.

The originality of this research relates to the way it was conducted, drawing together the products of discrete but related activities. It adds to the growing research landscape involving the Street Pastors, an important faith-based, publicly backed initiative. But more importantly, it underlines how the two dimensions of New Right ideology come together in practice. The example of the Street Pastors indicates, through the lens of plural policing, how voluntary and local initiatives are being used to refocus the priorities of social and public policy.

The purpose of this paper is to review the book, Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back.

The author, himself an anthropologist, evaluates how a group of anthropologists responds to popular right‐of‐center pundits.

Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back is just as instructive for what it reveals about the current condition of anthropology – and, for that matter, left academia – as for what it says about the lack of anthropological sophistication in popular books that purport to tell us what is right or wrong with the world and where it is heading. Freighted with postmodernism, the influence of Michel Foucault in particular, present‐day anthropology makes assumptions not unlike those of the Straussians of the far right. Thus, our left‐of‐center anthropologists have trouble locating what is so objectionable about reactionary conservatism and, at the same time, difficulties in assessing social conditions, both at home and abroad. The author ends with sketching an anthropology that would pay more attention to the psychological and environmental costs of globalization.

Notes that the 12 contributions dispense with academic jargon and try to reestablish a public presence for anthropology – a format which may reach a wider public.

Officially, of course, the world is now post-imperial. The Q’ing and Ottoman empires fell on the eve of World War I, and the last Leviathans of Europe's imperial past, the Austro-Hungarian and Tsarist empires, lumbered into the grave soon after. Tocsins of liberation were sounded on all sides, in the name of democracy (Wilson) and socialism (Lenin). Later attempts to remake and proclaim empires – above all, Hitler's annunciation of a “Third Reich” – now seem surreal, aberrant, and dystopian. The Soviet Union, the heir to the Tsarist empire, found it prudent to call itself a “federation of socialist republics.” Mao's China followed suit. Now, only a truly perverse, contrarian regime would fail to deploy the rhetoric of democracy.

This chapter brings together the insights of Stuart Scheingold's work on political criminology and urban social control with subsequent work on the politics of affect or “public feelings.” I argue that Scheingold prefigured the turn to affect in his study of crime politics and that his attention to the way affect-driven politicization plays out differently at different political levels (local, national) usefully complicates the current focus on national politics.

How is the global embedded in the national? How do national institutions enable global relations? And how in turn is citizenship being transformed as a social, political, and legal institution amidst these two-way ties? These are some of the important questions at the heart of Saskia Sassen's paper examining the “denationalization” of citizenship. Drawing on a wide diversity of theoretical literatures, and complicating simple sound bites with her sensitivity to the contested character of key concepts, Sassen here offers inspiration and provocation in equal amounts. Her approach is inspiring in part because of the insistence from the start that it is the always-incomplete nature of citizenship that allows for it to be both developed and studied as an outcome of diverse insurgencies against the exclusion and marginalization of the non-citizen or sub-citizen. Sassen thus models a way of theorizing citizenship that problematizes its enclosure as a fixed and finalized socio-legal institution. Instead, she shows how it can be explored as a congeries of ongoing and open-ended citizenship struggles or projects. These ongoing processes of redefinition, she suggests, have a tendential trajectory, and it is with Sassen's attempt to chart this trajectory that her paper makes its particular provocation: namely the argument that today, in the context of globalization, we are seeing citizenship becoming increasingly denationalized.

A review essay on E. K. Hunt, History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective, updated second edition. Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. xxii+543 pp. ISBN 0-7656-0606-2 (hard cover); 0-7656-0607-0 (paper). As Kay Hunt writes in the preface, “This book…is very different from any other history of thought now in print” (p. xvii). It is written from an explicitly Marxian viewpoint and is consistently – and vehemently – anti-utilitarian. Hunt begins with a definition of capitalism (pp. 3–8) and ends with “comments on the social perspective underlying the present book” (pp. 514–520), in which he denounces utilitarian psychology and ethics as a conservative ideology for capitalism. No social theory, he argues, can possibly be value-free. His own ethical position is derived from Veblen, Marx and Maslow. There exists a hierarchy of human needs, and they are rarely satisfied under capitalism, which encourages us to treat other people as means, not ends, and thereby promotes alienation and social fragmentation. “I believe,” Hunt concludes, “with Veblen and Marx, that capitalism is not the highest stage of human development and that if human beings ever assert their collective humanity against the irrationality of capitalism, they will open a vista of passionate possibilities hardly dreamed of during the reign of capitalism” (p. 520).