Popular Justice, Criminal Violence, and Alternative Policing in the New South Africa: The Politics of Order in a Brave Neo World

新南非的大众司法、刑事暴力和替代警务：勇敢新世界中的秩序政治

• 批准号: 0514207
• 负责人: John Comaroff
• 金额: $ 12.49万
• 依托单位: American Bar Foundation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2005
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2005-09-01 至 2008-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0514207&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Popular; Justice; Criminal; Violence; Alternative

South Africa, like many other countries, is currently afflicted by an epidemic of "vigilantism," a term that mis-identifies a number of different species of alternative policing, retributive violence, and popular justice. Why has there been such a rapid rise in criminal counter-violence, counter-violence that tends to be brutally disproportionate to the felonies it seeks to punish? Why, too, does it attract great popular support among people who refuse to participate in community policing programs under the aegis of the state? What does this retributive violence mean to the people who perpetrate it? Why do they do it, and what does it do for them? This project seeks to answer these broad questions. It also sets out to map and typify the various types of alternative law enforcement and popular justice that have emerged in South Africa; to establish how much legitimacy, public support, and active participation they actually enjoy among different sectors of the population; to account for both the substance and the form of these populist activities; to ascertain the extent to which they undermine state control over the means of violence; and to explain why efforts on the part of the government and the South African Police Services to create legitimate community policing structures have tended to fail badly, while informal community enforcement draws enthusiastic, broad-based participation. Finally, the project will place South Africa in comparative perspective, thus to determine whether the kinds, causes, and effects of alternative policing and popular justice here are the same as or different from those elsewhere. The study begins with an assertion and two working theses. The assertion is that while the mass resort to informal policing, in its various forms, is widely understood and portrayed as a pragmatic response to the realities of social disorder, it is also the product of an increasingly taken-for-granted ideological formation, one that hides itself in technical necessity. This suggests our first, very general working thesis: that the dramatic rise of alternative policing, retributive violence, and community justice in South Africa -- as well as their form and their content -- is a response to processes of executive devolution and moral deregulation that have accompanied the growth of neoliberal economic development and, in particular, its impact on the sovereign power of the state. The second thesis asserts that the more-or-less visible sociological dynamic at the core of alternative policing, retributive violence, and popular justice in South Africa is a generational antagonism, an antagonism fueled by conditions in which black male youth are caught up in a violent struggle with people of property.Ethnographic and documentary research will be centered in two locales within South Africa: (a) the rural and semi-rural Northwest, Limpopo and Mpumalanga Provinces, where alternative policing is at its most variously developed and where a basis has been laid for the investigative work; and (b) the urban precincts of Cape Town, in which a wide range of popular forms of justice are in evidence. Archival research will be centered in Pretoria and Cape Town. The product of this research will be a series of essays and a book.

与许多其他国家一样，南非目前正遭受“私刑主义”流行的困扰，这个术语错误地识别了许多不同种类的替代性警务、报复性暴力和民众正义。为什么反暴力刑事犯罪如此迅速增加，反暴力往往与它试图惩罚的重罪严重不相称？为什么它还能吸引那些拒绝参加国家支持下的社区警务项目的人们的广泛支持？这种报复性暴力对于施暴者意味着什么？他们为什么这样做，这对他们有什么作用？该项目旨在回答这些广泛的问题。它还着手绘制南非出现的各种替代执法和大众司法类型并对其进行典型化；确定他们在不同人群中实际享有多少合法性、公众支持和积极参与；解释这些民粹主义活动的实质和形式；查明它们在多大程度上破坏了国家对暴力手段的控制；并解释为什么政府和南非警察部门建立合法社区警务结构的努力往往会严重失败，而非正式的社区执法却吸引了热情、基础广泛的参与。最后，该项目将把南非置于比较的角度，从而确定这里的替代警务和大众司法的种类、原因和效果与其他地方是否相同或不同。 该研究以一个断言和两个工作论文开始。有人断言，虽然大众诉诸各种形式的非正式警务，被广泛理解并描述为对社会混乱现实的务实反应，但它也是一种日益被视为理所当然的意识形态形成的产物，这种意识形态隐藏在技术必要性之中。这表明了我们的第一个非常笼统的工作论点：南非替代性警务、报复性暴力和社区正义的急剧兴起及其形式和内容，是对行政权力下放和道德放松管制进程的回应，这些进程伴随着新自由主义经济发展的增长，特别是其对国家主权的影响。第二篇论文断言，南非替代性警务、报应性暴力和大众正义的核心或多或少可见的社会学动力是一种代际对抗，这种对抗是由黑人男性青年陷入与有产者的暴力斗争的条件所助长的。人种学和文献研究将集中在南非境内的两个地区：(a) 西北农村和半农村地区、林波波省和 普马兰加省，替代警务的发展最为多样化，并为调查工作奠定了基础； (b) 开普敦市区，这里有各种流行的司法形式。档案研究将集中在比勒陀利亚和开普敦。这项研究的成果将是一系列论文和一本书。