Popular Justice, Communal Violence, and Alternative Policing in the New South Africa (2004-2008)
Authors: John Comaroff, Jean Comaroff
South Africa is currently beset by so-called “vigilantism,” a term that covers a range of different kinds of “alternative” policing, retributive violence, and popular justice, much of it conducted in the virtuous cause of moral community and the rights of citizens to security of property and person. This study sets out to explain several things: why has there been such a rapid rise in criminal counter-violence; why it enjoys the support of over 50% of South Africans; what retributive violence means to the people who perpetrate it; why do they do it, and what it does for them. The project also sets out to map the various types of “alternative” law enforcement 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 investigate why efforts on the part of the South African Police to create legitimate community policing structures have failed, while “spontaneous,” 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 popular justice here are the same as or different from those elsewhere.
Research is being conducted at two sites within South Africa: (a) the rural and semi-rural Northwest, Limpopo, and Mpumalanga Provinces, where alternative policing is at its most variously developed; and (b) the urban precincts of Cape Town, in which a wide range of popular forms of justice are in evidence. The intended product of the research is to be a series of essays and a book.