Doing ‘social cohesion’: cultural policy and practice in outer metropolitan Melbourne

The emergence of ‘social cohesion’ as a policy concept in various Western states has been widely understood as part of a backlash against multiculturalism. This article applies an anthropological lens to the implementation of an Australian project to engage young people in order to ‘strengthen social cohesion’ in outer metropolitan Melbourne. Ethnographic analysis of the project lends empirical support to key critiques of the social cohesion paradigm, including the deployment of ‘community’ as a technology of cultural governance, the obscuring of socio-economic conditions and issues of social justice, and the foreclosing of any understanding of conflict as a potential social good. Some of the tensions evident in the project, however, are reflective not of recent shifts but rather of long-running dynamics in the governance of cultural difference. Thus, the article argues, narratives of a ‘multiculturalism backlash’ capture significant changes but also risk obscuring critical continuities in the exercise of governmentality.