Mette-Louise Johansen (associate professor, Department of Anthropology) is working in a new project on "Affective prevention: Partnership Policing and the Transformation of Urban Governance." The project is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) and led by Maya Mynster Christensen of the Royal Danish Defence College.

Anxiety and fear linked to ‘insider’ threats, often from the Muslim 'other', are increasingly becoming principal driving forces of urban security governance. The aim of this project is to investigate how affective urban governance is translated, negotiated and enacted in preventive partnership policing at the intersection between the war on gangs and the war on terror in Denmark. Through ethnographic studies of three cross-sectoral partnerships between police and municipalities targeting 1) prevention of gang crime, 2) prevention of extremism, and 3) promotion of exit programs, the project's ambition is to provide new insights into the entanglement of affect and emerging forms of urban security governance. By introducing the conceptual lens of ‘affective prevention’ the project analyzes the significance of affect as an object and a medium of governance and contribute to development of theory on how affect animates preventive interventions.