Urban Pacification and “Blitzes” in Contemporary Johannesburg

Abstract

The term pacification is regularly used in urban scholarship as a euphemism for state violence and social control. However, this term is used loosely and is underexplored as a concept. This paper aims to address this gap by discussing recent critical theory on pacification, which argues that the term captures the combination of war and police power in the replication of capitalist order. This concept will then be applied to a case study of "blitzes", a practice which became central to urban management in Johannesburg from the late 1990s. Originally, the word was used to refer to aggressive raids led by the police in "trouble" spots, but has since been expanded to include inspections on general services. Understood as pacification, blitzes reflect how the state is constantly engaged in a low-intensity war against perceived "disorder", which is intended to control and discipline spaces in South Africa's largest city.

From eviction to evicting: Rethinking the technologies, lives and power sustaining displacement

“…Eviction enforcement acts at multiple scales and across varied contexts, often emerging out of local conditions in a complex relationship with national government agendas. The creation of the South African Anti-Land Invasion Units, emerged out of a long prehistory of colonial and apartheid policing aimed at the violent prosecution of evictions against black and coloured squatters in South Africa, and can be linked to already established patterns of urban pacification elsewhere (McMichael, 2015(McMichael, :1268Wicks, 2017).Clearances for the World Expo in Shanghai in 2010 explicitly drew on the language of military strategy, as eviction crews called junshi (Military Strategists) and the negotiators responsible for dealing with reticent evictees, the jiandaoban (Sharp Knife Squad), removed residents from the Expo Area. Yunpen Zhang (2017:100-101) has articulated the genealogical relationship of western sovereign categories to Chinese Communist Party thought in the creation of these organisations, a framework combining official histories of guerrilla warfare and Schmittian identifications of friends/enemy underlying the 'exceptional' logic of the displacement program.…”

Everyday security: privatized policing, local legitimacy and atmospheres of control

“…Spectacular displays of force have been mobilized in efforts to reorder Johannesburg's inner-city in line with grand ambitious (Bremner, 2000;Gaule, 2005;Murray, 2008). In addition to the creation of several City Improvement Districts, in which informal traders, beggars and homeless people have been subjected to intensive forms of policing and control (Bénit-Gbaffou et al, 2012;Didier et al, 2012), numerous blitzes and policing crackdowns have been carried out (McMichael, 2015). These swift, violent police raids have primarily targeted unregulated informal traders and undocumented migrants.…”

Spatial Contestation, Victimisation and Resistance during Xenophobic Violence: The Experiences of Somali Migrants in Post‐Apartheid South Africa

“…For example, in townships, it has been displayed through mob actions such as looting, maiming, stoning and burning of victims and property or through banditry and other forms of gangsterism. In urban areas, xenophobia is performed through unscrupulous and tactical police and military operations in migrant‐concentrated areas (Gastrow & Amit, ; McMichael, ). Xenophobia in South Africa can therefore be linked to the notion that “where there is power, there is resistance” (Foucault, : 95) and conversely “where there is resistance, there is power” (Abu‐Lughod, : 42).…”