De-judicialization, Outsourced Review and All-too-flexible Bureaucracies in South African Land Restitution

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point a peculiar land claim within the ongoing South African land restitution process -more specifically, the legal and administrative technicalities that allowed for the implosion of the accompanying court case in the Land Claims Court -to open up a space for reflection on the ambiguous nature of state bureaucracies as ambiguity-reducing machines. Tracing the specificities of bureaucratic attempts at foreclosing ambiguities and insufficiencies in state practice, I show how a reorientation towards the new public goods of 'service delivery' , 'transparency' and 'accountability' brought about a pronounced regime of performance indicators and de-judicialized bureaucratic flexibility. Demonstrating how these attempts to reduce ambiguities created new zones of ambiguity and unaccountability of their own, I argue for a post-Weberian analysis of the path-dependent realities of 'bureaucratic authority' to help us understand the seemingly arbitrary structural violence that state bureaucracies often enact.

The “new pastoral commons” of Eastern and Southern Africa

“…However, the rights and obligations of individual CPA members were not specified. In most CPAs, only a minority of members are actively working on the land, while most members make their living from non-agricultural employment and businesses (Zenker 2015). In contrast to the Kenyan group ranches, CPAs cannot be sub-divided.…”

Documents and the bureaucratisation of alternative dispute resolution in the United States

“…rights regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately rests of the threat of force ' (2012: 112). Others (Auyero 2012;Borrelli and Lindberg 2019;Eldridge 2018;Gupta 2012;Guyol-Meinrath Echeverry 2018;Kim 2018;Nakueira 2019;Reinke 2018;Sheehan 2018;Zenker 2015) have marshalled ethnographic data and insights to reveal how bureaucratic infrastructures, their associated rules (both written and unwritten) and insider knowledge work to cultivate structural violence that disproportionately harms particular sociocultural groups. The violence of bureaucracy has also been imagined as everyday -manifest in regulations and lack thereof, rituals, routines and the availability of resources (Borrelli and Lindberg 2019;Rajan 2001).…”

Anthropology on trial: exploring the laws of anthropological expertise

“…Over the course of fifteen months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in South Africa since 2010, I have traced land restitution within and between various state institutions and regarding four exemplary claim settings all related to the former homeland KwaNdebele (see Zenker 2012, 2014, 2015a, 2015b). Throughout this research, my slowly growing expertise has been in demand by a number of different actors: various land claimants, current landowners, legal representatives, NGO activists and state officials have asked me to share my knowledge and opinions with them regarding potential next steps and likely outcomes of processes in which we were all enmeshed.…”