Community

This chapter on community explores some of the different meanings of community as belonging. It follows Gerard Delanty’s argument (2009) that community has an inescapable normative dimension, that belonging is never finite, and the longing for community can never be fulfilled. As he argues, the search for belonging takes place in an insecure world, structured by the boundaries of community and by exclusion so that belonging itself is insecure. What does it mean not to belong, not only on a local, regional or national level, but also to the international? People argue not only about the authenticity of the community, but about the status and the value of its members, and there is a broad range of critical literature on the idea of ‘community’ that relates to questions of identity and difference, and to the social relations of power embedded in structures of class, race, gender and nation. Drawing on my own research in addition to that of others, I will focus on a particular, liberal notion of community and in particular its relationship to property and ownership. I will then go on to consider how these constructions of community play out in international politics, in particular at the borders of the nation state and in the social and political relations of colonialism. This focus draws out the normative dimensions of community and its connection to the value of power relations, expressed through notions of honour and dishonour, distinction and degradation. [Opening paragraph]