Images of Punishment in the People’s Courts of Cape Town 1985–7: from Prefigurative Justice to Populist Violence

Schärf, Wilfried; Ngcokoto, Baba Z. D.

doi:10.1007/978-1-349-21074-9_14

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Politically, street justice served as a critique of the state. Unlike policing organizations within the antiapartheid struggle like the People's Courts, 21 this was not a critique of the legitimacy of the state per se but rather a critique of ways in which the police appeared, or failed to appear, in people's daily lives. As Salwar Ismail noted with reference to Egypt, citizens 'come to experience the state in the ways in which it does not exist for them and not just the ways that it does'.…”

Section: Framing 'Street Justice' In Kwamashumentioning

confidence: 99%

Policing in intimate crowds: Moving beyond 'the mob' in South Africa

Cooper-Knock¹

2014

African Affairs

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A growing scholarship on policing and security has given us valuable insights into the workings of private security firms, state police, and citizen-led policing organisations across Africa. In contrast, few have explored 'mob justice'-the policing performed by less organised, more transient formations of citizens. In academic and popular accounts, mobs are depicted as anonymous, sovereign entities, acting in a space that the state will not, or cannot, enter. Focusing on the township of KwaMashu in Durban, South Africa, I challenge this homogenous depiction. Although anonymous mobs punctuate the township's history, residents often find themselves within 'intimate crowds', navigating the ties that frequently bind them to their suspects, and negotiating a space in which they can act without fear of repercussion, legal or otherwise. The state police often play an important role in shaping the parameters of this policing, even when no case is formally opened. This reappraisal of policing formations consolidates and extends our understanding of statehood, society and sovereignty in postapartheid South Africa.

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Section: Framing 'Street Justice' In Kwamashumentioning

confidence: 99%

Policing in intimate crowds: Moving beyond 'the mob' in South Africa

Cooper-Knock¹

2014

African Affairs

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“…Discipline committees, self-defense units, and people's courts took the place of the formal institutions of community policing (by apartheid police) to which politicized township people refused to submit themselves. [24][25][26][27][28] Street committees and civic associations re-defined and bolstered male identity, 29,30 producing an idealized image of the young ANC and PAC comrade as one who was strong, upright, disciplined, respectful of communal norms and of new political values, accountable to his colleagues and who recognized the true "enemy"-the apartheid state and all its collaborators, black as well as white. Age was not a factor and even very young men could usurp positions of authority and control in the townships.…”

Section: Popular Justice and The Comradesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dangerous and Endangered Youth: Social Structures and Determinants of Violence

Scheper‐Hughes

2004

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

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Structural violence is violence that is permissible, even encouraged. It refers to the invisible social machinery of inequality that reproduces social relations of exclusion and marginalization via ideologies, stigmas, and dangerous discourses (such as "youth violence" itself) attendant to race, class, sex, and other invidious distinctions. Structural violence "naturalizes" poverty, sickness, hunger, and premature death, erasing their social and political origins so that they are taken for granted and no one is held accountable except the poor themselves. Structural violence also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable (even those from their own class and community) into expendable non-persons, thus allowing the licence--even the duty--to kill them. I exemplify this through two ethnographic critical case studies: the operation of a virulent death squad in Northeast Brazil that mobilized the support of ordinary people in an almost genocidal attack against Afro-Brazilian street kids and young "marginals"; and the uneasy truce with, and incomplete integration of "dangerous and endangered" youth still living in squatter camps and shack communities of urban South Africa.

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“…If form is opposed to substance, then before long, individual rights are opposed to social interests, and a simplistic opposition between the values of individual and social justice is established. In this particular version of antinomialism, popular justice is portrayed, either positively as affirming collective over individual ends or negatively as a kind of 'mob rule' (compare Spitzer,1982, Cain, 1985, Allison, 1990Sachs and Welch, 1990;Scharf and Ngcokoto, 1990). Either way, popular justice is portrayed as separate from and inimical to individual justice, but this, I shall argue, is a process that is immanent in the theoretical tools employed rather than in the phenomenon itself.…”

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confidence: 99%

From Law to Popular Justice: Beyond Antinomialism

Norrie

1996

Social & Legal Studies

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Images of Punishment in the People’s Courts of Cape Town 1985–7: from Prefigurative Justice to Populist Violence

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Policing in intimate crowds: Moving beyond 'the mob' in South Africa

Policing in intimate crowds: Moving beyond 'the mob' in South Africa

Dangerous and Endangered Youth: Social Structures and Determinants of Violence

From Law to Popular Justice: Beyond Antinomialism

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