This paper asks what crime prevention looks like for residents in informal settlements in Khayelitsha, a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town. It engages with the idea of vigilantism and hybrid policing formations, analyzing the overlaps and intersections between legal community-based crime prevention initiatives, and local 'punitive practices'. The focus is not on the intensely violent spectacle of 'mob justice', where suspects are killed, but on the more ubiquitous, hybrid formations that also fall on the vigilantism continuum. These include coercive practices such as banishment, corporal punishment, retrieval of stolen goods by local policing formations and, trials conducted by street committees. The core argument I make is that, at times, particularly in poor areas where the state is absent and encourages citizens to take responsibility for their own crime prevention, the boundary between legality and coercive illegality collapses in on itself. Thus, the notion of voluntarism, that is so important to official discourse on crime, is particularly problematic when applied in poor communities with high rates of unemployment and high crime rates. As such, the state's encouraging of citizens to take responsibility for their own safety, alongside a punitive state discourse on crime and criminality, creates the space for illegal vigilante style actions to emerge in the shadow of legal crime prevention initiatives.We chased the witchdoctor away from Khayelitsha. We went in his house, saw lots of medicine, snakes. He lived in E block. We told him: you can't stay in Khayelitsha so he left.
This paper asks how punitive forms of non-state punishment play out on the margins of the state, in informal (shack) settlements in South Africa. My focus is on the practice of forcing those who are suspected of certain offences to leave their homes in informal settlements. I refer to this as ‘banishment’ and argue that it is a ‘penal phenomenon’ which is intimately tied to the general precarity that residents experience on a daily basis. The paper examines the ways in which these formally illegal, but nonetheless legitimate practices, draw on and reconfigure liberal state punishment. I use my study to make a broader theoretical point about the interplay between lawful state punishment and unlawful punishment on the periphery of the state. The blurred boundaries between legal (state) violence and illegal (but nonetheless legitimate) violence are particularly ‘visible’ in situations of ‘precarious penality’ – a term that I use to describe the unstable, violent and exclusionary penality that manifests in situations of socio-economic precarity, particularly in contexts of inequality, high rates of violent crime and a delegitimated rule of law. In these circumstances ‘non-state’ punishment contributes to the construction and maintenance of group boundaries and fulfils a similar function to ‘formal’ punishment. Thus, I ask whether it makes sense to exclude ‘non-state’ public authorities which act against ‘criminality’, when asking what or who constitutes the penal field and, when measuring state punitiveness?
This article aims to clarify the relationship between state authority, vigilantism and penal power. I ask how shifting political contexts shape the construction of the 'vigilante' and the legitimation (or not) of vigilante violence. Based on a historical analysis of how the terms 'vigilante', 'vigilantism' and 'mob justice' are used in mainstream discourse in South Africa the article tracks the political transformations that took place in the South African state in the late 1970s, the mid-1980s and post-1994. I use the term 'precarious penality' to describe penality on the periphery-both geographically, in marginalized poor black townships-and symbolically, to denote spaces where the boundaries between what is 'state' and what is not are blurred. Spaces of 'precarious penality' pose specific problems for the liberal principles of due process and human rights that are enshrined in the South African Constitution but often distorted in practice.
While there is an established literature on the relationship between political economy and state punishment, there is less work on how punishment is constituted from below in contexts of inequality. This article analyses the discourse around incidents of lethal collective violence that occurred in 2015 in a former black township in South Africa. I use this as a lens for examining how punitive forms of popular justice interact with state punishment. Whether via the slow violence of structural inequality or the viscerally corporeal high rates of interpersonal violence, my interviewees were intimately acquainted with violence. Although they supported long-term imprisonment, none of them came across as stereotypical right-wing populists. Instead, they adopted complex positions, calling for a type of punitive welfarism, which combined harsh solutions to crime with explicit recognition of the importance of dealing with ‘root causes’. I argue that when the state is perceived to be failing to both impose punishment and provide welfare, violence becomes a technology of exchange, which simultaneously seeks both more punishment and more welfare. The result is an assemblage of exclusionary penal forms.
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