New Publication: The Geography of Discontent Revisited
Accepted at National Identities
I’m pleased to share that my latest paper, The Geography of Discontent Revisited: Decoupling Attitudinal Clustering and Affective Intensification in Urban Britain, has been accepted for publication in National Identities.
This piece represents several years of work as scientific coordinator for the Horizon 2020 DRIVE project, drawing on a representative survey of 2,535 UK respondents conducted across five major cities—London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Leeds—in 2023.
Why This Matters (Beyond the Obvious)
Some of the findings will feel intuitive to anyone who has watched British politics unfold over the past decade. Of course economic inequality fuels resentment. Of course national media narratives shape how we see each other. And, of course, living somewhere that feels neglected makes everything seem more desperate.
But there is a difference between knowing something in your gut and being able to show the mechanics of how it works. What this study offers is a systematic map of the relationship between place, psychology, and political sentiment—one that challenges some assumptions about where discontent actually comes from.
How We Mapped the Landscape
To get beneath the surface of “Leave versus Remainer” binaries, I used Latent Class Analysis (LCA)—a statistical technique that groups people according to shared patterns of response rather than demographic boxes. This allowed us to identify the actual architecture of attitudes toward diversity and immigration.
We then tested these attitudinal clusters against the geographical contexts where people live, using multilevel modelling to separate two distinct processes: sorting (does deprivation determine who becomes hostile?) versus amplification (does deprivation simply make existing sentiments more intense?).
What We Found: The Five Clusters
The LCA revealed five distinct attitudinal clusters within the white majority population. While the largest group—the ‘Anxious Nationalists’ (48%)—fits a familiar profile of racialised status threat and generalised hostility to immigrants, it is one of the smaller clusters that arguably reveals the most about contemporary British politics.
The ‘Pro-Diversity, Pro-Securitisation’ group (16%) presents a striking paradox. Members of this cluster register strong support for cultural diversity in the abstract (high probability of agreeing diversity is “a good thing”) while simultaneously viewing Muslims as a “problem” (high probability on that specific item).
This is not a coherent worldview in any philosophical sense. Rather, it captures something more troubling: the decoupling of liberal cosmopolitanism from specific racialised anxieties. As the paper acknowledges, this pattern likely represents how anti-Muslim sentiment survives in an era of progressive norms—not by rejecting diversity tout court, but by partitioning it. The “security” frame provides a discursive mechanism through which prejudice can be expressed while maintaining a self-conception of tolerance.
Similarly, the ‘Hard Secularist’ cluster (6%) shows low anxiety about immigrants generally but elevated concern specifically about Muslims. Whether this represents genuine secularist critique or “laundered” Islamophobia (to use the term we borrow from Blommaert and Coenders) is impossible to determine definitively from survey data. What we can say is that these clusters demonstrate how contemporary anti-diversity sentiment often coexists with, rather than contradicts, liberal values.
The remaining groups—the ‘Consistent Liberals’ (21%) and ‘Ambivalent Centrists’ (9%)—round out the typology, but it is the friction within that “Pro-Diversity, Pro-Securitisation” bloc that most complicates our understanding of prejudice today.
The Geography Question
The crucial finding, however, came from the geographical analysis. City-level deprivation did not predict which cluster someone belonged to. Whether you lived in affluent London or deprived Glasgow, your probability of being an “Anxious Nationalist”—or indeed a “Pro-Diversity, Pro-Securitisation” type—remained essentially the same. The formation of these worldviews appears to be a national process, driven by Westminster political discourse and media ecosystems that transcend local boundaries.
But—and this is the critical distinction—place acts as a powerful amplifier. For those already experiencing status threat (or harboring those specific securitised anxieties about Muslims), living in a deprived urban context significantly intensified the emotional force of their sentiment. The interaction between individual grievance and neighbourhood deprivation created a kind of echo chamber, validating and magnifying anxieties that were forged at the national level.
Visualising the Disconnect
The figure below illustrates this decoupling. As you can see, despite significant variation in deprivation scores across our five cities (shown in the map), the distribution of attitudinal clusters remains remarkably consistent across all locations.
[The map showing the five UK cities coloured by IMD deprivation scores, alongside the stacked bar chart showing proportional distribution of the five attitudinal clusters]
This visual evidence underscores the paper’s central argument: we are not looking at a geography that creates these attitudes—including that peculiar “Pro-Diversity, Pro-Securitisation” hybrid—but one that amplifies them. The “geography of discontent” is not about where attitudes are born; it is about where they are felt most acutely.
Implications for Policy and Politics
If attitudinal clusters are forged by national narratives, then local community cohesion initiatives face an uphill battle. You cannot easily counteract worldviews constructed by the national press and political rhetoric through neighbourhood projects alone. This is particularly true for that 16% who combine pro-diversity rhetoric with specific anti-Muslim sentiment; their views are not likely to be shifted by local contact alone, since they already believe themselves to be cosmopolitan.
However, the amplification effect offers a clear mandate for place-based intervention. If deprivation acts as a “volume control” for resentment—or for that specific securitised anxiety—then addressing spatial stigma, investing in public services, and reducing neighbourhood inequality are not merely economic necessities. They are political interventions that can dampen the intensity of affective polarisation, even if they cannot resolve the underlying ideological contradictions.
The challenge, of course, is doing this without reinforcing the stigma itself. Regeneration schemes that publicly label areas as “problem” neighbourhoods risk exacerbating the very injuries of place they seek to heal.
Looking Ahead
What strikes me most about these findings—particularly the emergence of that contradictory “Pro-Diversity, Pro-Securitisation” cluster—is how they complicate our understanding of prejudice in post-Brexit Britain. We are no longer dealing (if we ever were) with a simple opposition between “racists” and “tolerant” citizens. Instead, we see a landscape where anti-Muslim sentiment increasingly hides in plain sight, nested within otherwise progressive attitudes.
The full paper will be appearing in National Identities later this year, with full methodological appendices and robustness checks. For now, I hope this offers a useful glimpse into how systematic research can give precision to intuitions we all share—and perhaps shift the conversation from simply managing diversity to understanding the national stories (and their contradictions) that shape how we feel about it.
Tahir Abbas is Professor of Criminology and Global Justice and Director of the Centre on Radicalisation, Inclusion, and Social Equity at Aston University. He was scientific coordinator for the EU Horizon 2020 DRIVE project.