South Africa, like many other countries, is currently afflicted by an epidemic of "vigilantism," a term that mis-identifies a number of different species of alternative policing, retributive violence, and popular justice. Why has there been such a rapid rise in criminal counter-violence, counter-violence that tends to be brutally disproportionate to the felonies it seeks to punish? Why, too, does it attract great popular support among people who refuse to participate in community policing programs under the aegis of the state? What does this retributive violence mean to the people who perpetrate it? Why do they do it, and what does it do for them? This project seeks to answer these broad questions. It also sets out to map and typify the various types of alternative law enforcement and popular justice that have emerged in South Africa; to establish how much legitimacy, public support, and active participation they actually enjoy among different sectors of the population; to account for both the substance and the form of these populist activities; to ascertain the extent to which they undermine state control over the means of violence; and to explain why efforts on the part of the government and the South African Police Services to create legitimate community policing structures have tended to fail badly, while informal community enforcement draws enthusiastic, broad-based participation. Finally, the project will place South Africa in comparative perspective, thus to determine whether the kinds, causes, and effects of alternative policing and popular justice here are the same as or different from those elsewhere.
The study begins with an assertion and two working theses. The assertion is that while the mass resort to informal policing, in its various forms, is widely understood and portrayed as a pragmatic response to the realities of social disorder, it is also the product of an increasingly taken-for-granted ideological formation, one that hides itself in technical necessity. This suggests our first, very general working thesis: that the dramatic rise of alternative policing, retributive violence, and community justice in South Africa -- as well as their form and their content -- is a response to processes of executive devolution and moral deregulation that have accompanied the growth of neoliberal economic development and, in particular, its impact on the sovereign power of the state. The second thesis asserts that the more-or-less visible sociological dynamic at the core of alternative policing, retributive violence, and popular justice in South Africa is a generational antagonism, an antagonism fueled by conditions in which black male youth are caught up in a violent struggle with people of property.
Ethnographic and documentary research will be centered in two locales within South Africa: (a) the rural and semi-rural Northwest, Limpopo and Mpumalanga Provinces, where alternative policing is at its most variously developed and where a basis has been laid for the investigative work; and (b) the urban precincts of Cape Town, in which a wide range of popular forms of justice are in evidence. Archival research will be centered in Pretoria and Cape Town. The product of this research will be a series of essays and a book.
