This book offers distinct insights into the sources of state legitimacy in Africa by incorporating an analysis of non-state actors’ role in service delivery. The author examines how citizens’ reliance on non-governmental security actors such as street committees, neighborhood watches and community police forums, shape their attitudes toward the state and their political participation. Broadly, this project contributes to our understanding of citizens' everyday experiences of crime and violence at the local level, and why they matter, politically.

This book deals with the historic transition to democracy in South Africa and its impact upon crime and punishment. It examines how the problem of crime has emerged as a major issue to be governed in post-apartheid South Africa. Having undergone a dramatic transition from authoritarianism to democracy, from a white minority to black majority government, South Africa provides rich material on the role that political authority, and challenges to it, play in the construction of crime and criminality. As such, the study is about the socio-cultural and political significance of crime and punishment in the context of a change of regime. The work uses the South African case study to examine a question of wider interest, namely the politics of punishment and race in neoliberalizing regimes. It provides interesting and illuminating empirical material to the broader debate on crime control in post-welfare/neoliberalizing/post transition polities.

This book examines the politics of crime and the response to it in Potchefstroom, a small settler colonial city in South Africa. It draws on the city’s everyday practices and experiences to offer local bottom-up insights into security beyond the state. The book provides a comprehensive understanding of security beyond the state and how security workers and residents experience and perceive their own security practices, their daily interactions with other security providers which influences power dynamics between those who express fear through various platforms and those deemed potential criminals. It aids in re-conceptualising violence and security governance in South Africa with a view to analysing the processes of crime prevention and management, the changing nature of public and private spaces and how these spaces interact with state and local authorities. In a rigorous exploration of the ways to tackle the complex problem of crime, the book critiques an overreliance on security infrastructures such as social media, gated barriers, neighbourhood residents’ associations and private security companies. It also looks at how crime is treated as an individual as opposed to a societal problem. The book addresses the urgent need for collaboration across these fault lines to promote a more inclusive security in a broader fragmented social and political context. With a novel analytical approach based on the twin optics of infrastructure and post-structural hegemony, the book will be relevant to scholars and students of South African politics and critical security studies, as well as international audience interested in crime and private security.

This unique volume seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct the pervasive, almost ritualistic, association of Africa with forms of terrorism as well as extreme violence, the latter bordering on and including genocide. Africa is tendentiously associated with violence in the popular and academic imagination alike. Written by leading authorities in postcolonial studies and African history, as well as highly promising emergent scholars, this book highlights political, social and cultural processes in Africa which incite violence or which facilitate its negotiation or negation through non-violent social practice. The chapters cover diverse historical periods ranging from fourteenth century Ethiopia and early twentieth century Cameroon, to contemporary analyses set in Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast and South Africa. It makes a crucial contribution to a revitalized understanding of the social and historical coordinates of violence - or its absence - in African settings. Violence and Non-Violence in Africa will be of interest to students and scholars of African history and anthropology, colonialism and post-colonialism, political science and Africanist cultural studies.

In this book, renowned anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff make a startling but absolutely convincing claim about our modern era: it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves—it is by our crimes. Surveying an astonishing range of forms of crime and policing—from petty thefts to the multibillion-dollar scams of too-big-to-fail financial institutions to the collateral damage of war—they take readers into the disorder of the late modern world. Looking at recent transformations in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance that have led to an era where crime and policing are ever more complicit, they offer a powerful meditation on the new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political economy of representation that have arisen. To do so, the Comaroffs draw on their vast knowledge of South Africa, especially, and its struggle to build a democracy founded on the rule of law out of the wreckage of long years of violence and oppression. There they explore everything from the fascination with the supernatural in policing to the extreme measures people take to prevent home invasion, drawing illuminating comparisons to the United States and United Kingdom. Going beyond South Africa, they offer a global criminal anthropology that attests to criminality as the constitutive fact of contemporary life, the vernacular by which politics are conducted, moral panics voiced, and populations ruled. The result is a disturbing but necessary portrait of the modern era, one that asks critical new questions about how we see ourselves, how we think about morality, and how we are going to proceed as a global society.

Daily life in Africa is governed by the 'petty' corruption of public officials in services such as health, transport, or the judicial system. This remarkable study of everyday corruption in three African countries investigates the reasons for its extraordinary prevalence. The authors construct an illuminating analytical framework around the various forms of corruption, the corruptive strategies public officials resort to, and how these forms and strategies have become embedded in daily administrative practices. They investigate the roots of the system in the growing inability of weakened states in Africa to either reward their employees adequately or to deliver expected services. They conclude that corruption in Africa today is qualitatively different from other parts of the world in its pervasiveness, its legitimations, and its huge impact on the nature of the state.

A detailed account of politics in Ghana's urban neighborhoods, providing a new way to understand African democracy and development.