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This chapter draws upon ethnographic observation and walking interviews with private security staff to offer in-depth insight into the hyper-regulation of the city and the lived dynamics of parkour’s inconsistent inclusion and exclusion from urban space. This chapter argues that the street-level governance of urban space is largely incoherent, fractured and characterised by a myriad of conflicting spatial interests. As neoliberalism has privatised and fractured the city into a series of microspheres of spatial sovereignty, there is a lack of any notion of the common urban good; therefore, what should be allowed and prohibited from urban space. This is a manifestation of the broader trend towards post-political forms of governance. It is argued that the confusion and contradiction that surrounds what city spaces should be for actively contributed to the forms of spatial compromise developed between private security and the traceurs.

This chapter outlines the book’s rationale and approach in addition to its general argument. It introduces the reader to what the author has described as a ‘paradox’ of parkour, whereby parkour and freerunning is hyper-conformist to the values of consumer capitalism whilst its free practice is excluded and marginalised from urban space. Before offering methodological commentary on the book’s ethnographic approach and outlining the structure of the book, it looks how this paradox is a product of late-capitalism’s own making – making reference to processes of deindustrialisation, neoliberalism and the rise of consumer capitalism.

This chapter offers a theoretical appraisal of our contemporary hyper-regulated urban spaces situated against a backdrop of deindustrialisation, the shift to consumer economies and the rise of the creative city paradigm. While existing work has characterised urban space as dead and asocial spaces bereft of life. This chapter opts to think our city centres as ‘Zombie Cities’: cities which have been eviscerated the social but are forced to wear the exterior signs of life through the injection of economically productive but artificial modes of culture and creativity. This sets the stage for explaining why parkour is inconsistently included and excluded from urban space, and how it attains spatio-economically contingent legitimacy and inclusion into urban space that problematises existing theoretical perspectives around a revanchist urbanism.

A number of incidents and community movements in the post-economic growth era have come to shape understandings of the Republic of Ireland’s marginalized groupings. These groups exist in both urban streetscapes and rural communities; all have come to represent a new culture of transgressive resistance in a state that has never completely dealt with issues of political legitimacy or extensive poverty, creating a deviant form of ‘liquid modernity’ which provides the space for such groupings to exist. This chapter demonstrates that the prevailing ideology in contemporary, post-downturn Ireland have created the conditions for incidents of ‘cultural criminology’ that at times erupt into episodes of counter-hegemonic street level governmentality.

The chapter further argues that these groups which have emerged may represent the type of transgressive Foucaultian governmentality envisaged by Kevin Stenson, while they are indicative of subcultures of discontent and nascent racism, which belie the contented findings of various affluence and contentment surveys conducted during the years of rapid growth. The chapter develops this theme of counter-hegemonic ‘governmentality’, or the regional attempts to challenge authorities by local groups of transgressors. The chapter finally argues that, in many ways, the emergence of a culture of criminality in the Irish case, and media depictions of the same can be said to stem from the corruption of that country’s elites as much as from any agenda for resistance from its beleaguered subcultures.

The progressive limits to rights mobilization have become starkly apparent in the past two decades. No new suspect classes have been forthcoming from the Supreme Court since 1977 despite continued demands for legal recognition by lesbians and gays, indigenous peoples and others interested in expanding civil rights doctrine. Public tolerance for civil rights measures has likewise dried up. Since the 1960s, referenda on civil rights have halted affirmative action programs, limited school busing and housing discrimination protections, promoted English-only laws, limited AIDS policies, and ended the judicial recognition of same-sex marriage, among other issues. Nearly 80% of these referenda have had outcomes realizing the Madisonian fear of “majority tyranny”¹ and signaling the Nietzschean dread of a politics of resentment (Brown, 1995, p. 214; Connolly, 1991, p. 64).

This study explores the simultaneous transitions in Palestine/Israel and South Africa at the end of the 20th century through an analysis of the shifting geography of Johannesburg and Jerusalem. After analyzing the relationship between political, economic and spatial restructuring, I examine the walled enclosures that mark the landscapes of post-apartheid Johannesburg and post-Oslo Jerusalem. I conclude by arguing that these walled enclosures reveal several interconnected aspects of the relationship between neo-liberal restructuring and the militarization of urban space. They also exemplify different configurations of sovereignty under conditions of neo-liberalism and empire.

As social movements engage in transnational legal processes, they have articulated innovative rights claims outside the nation-state frame. This chapter analyzes emerging practices of legal mobilization in response to global governance through a case study of the “right to food sovereignty.” The claim of food sovereignty has been mobilized transnationally by small-scale food producers, food-chain workers, and the food insecure to oppose the liberalization of food and agriculture. The author analyzes the formation of this claim in relation to the rise of a “network imaginary” of global governance. By drawing on ethnographic research, the author shows how activists have internalized this imaginary within their claims and practices of legal mobilization. In doing so, the author argues, transnational food sovereignty activists co-constitute global food governance from below. Ultimately, the development of these practices in response to shifting forms of transnational legality reflects the enduring, mutually constitutive relationship between law and social movements on a global scale.

Why and how was the territorialized state form disseminated through colonial expansion? To begin to answer this question, this study proposes a relational account of the production of territorialized state space, drawing on empirical evidence from two understudied cases of colonial expansion in the early 20th century: Spain in Morocco and Italy in Libya. Drawing on colonial and local archival sources, I demonstrate how colonial territoriality resulted from a violent clash between an aspiring colonial power and a reactive, rural counter-state building movement, led by the Amir Abd al-Krim in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco and the Sanusi leader, Omar al-Mokhtar, in Cyrenaica in eastern Libya. Territorialization was not imposed from the outside by a European colonial power. Rather, it was produced relationally through violent interactions between the colonial state and a local autonomous political entity. This analysis contributes to the still-nascent study of colonial state space and to contemporary policy debates about political order in North Africa and the Middle East by emphasizing the importance of local political mobilization, the complexity of interactions catalyzed across local and translocal scales by colonial expansion, and the high levels of physical violence endemic to the production of territorialized state space.

Law requires translations in order to make the mundane world legible to the legal sphere. This translation requires transposing an infinite landscape of ethical possibilities into a set number of categories, modes of speech, reasoning, and histories. The body represents both a challenge to this translation while illuminating the historical contingency of the contaminants that ineluctably shape law’s responsiveness. This chapter is concerned with the way the figure of the body in law acts as a kind of absent presence through the writ of habeas corpus, what Roberto Esposito (2015) calls ‘the silent mechanism that facilitates the passage from one mechanism to another through the chain of symbols engendered by its very presence’. The author would like to trace this chain of symbols which permits the passage from differing legal mechanisms through the history of the writ of habeas corpus to examine how it served as one vehicle through which law established predominance in Colonial British Columbia. Through British Columbia colonial legal history, this chapter will examine how Habeas corpus was used to more than merely seize jurisdiction but, more pointedly, to mobilise images of sovereignty to bolster local, contingent, and contextual forms of authority and sovereignty. In the end, the author’s argument will contribute to an understanding of the various mechanisms and discourses that sought to envelope the differing peoples, landscapes, and topographies of British Columbia into a single normative and affective legal atmosphere, as lawmakers sought to distinguish themselves from their southern neighbour’s colonial experience.