Samenvatting

Empowerment has become a hegemonic moral horizon and key modality of governance across the global South and the global North. Whether in the realm of development or in that of welfare and urban governance, a broad range of actors, from local NGOs to social professionals and international donors, now envision the empowerment of local communities as a crucial condition and means for achieving good governance and social justice (Cruikshank 1999; Rose 1996). Anthropologists and development scholars – including ourselves – often find themselves ambivalently positioned in relation to such projects of empowerment. In this essay, we turn to the hesitancies and experimental practices of our research interlocuters in two urban settings saturated by a ‘will to empower’ (Cruikshank 1999). During ten months in the year 2017, Anick followed the everyday practices of family workers in three community centers and neighborhood associations in the northeast of Paris, who were tasked to help working-class and migrant-background parents regain confidence and agency vis-à-vis state institutions. Like the parents with whom they worked, many of these family workers hailed from the banlieue themselves and were of migrant backgrounds. Naomi worked with 15 male former gang leaders in Mombasa (Kenya) who sought to reform themselves to escape police violence. Naomi’s interlocutors were between 16 and 28 years old and worked closely with their friend Hasso during 2019 and 2022. In this period, Naomi conducted eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with these young men and with Hasso, during which she observed their weekly meetings and the individual lives of several group members, and she conducted life history interviews with five of them. These two cases thus figure actors who were differently positioned in relation to the will to empower.