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

南非，像许多其他国家一样，目前正受到“私刑”流行病的困扰，这一术语错误地识别了一些不同种类的替代警务、报复性暴力和民众正义。为什么反暴力犯罪会如此迅速地上升，反暴力往往与它试图惩罚的重罪不成比例？为什么它在那些拒绝参加国家庇护下的社区警务计划的人中也吸引了巨大的民众支持？这种报复性暴力对施暴者意味着什么？他们为什么要这么做，这对他们有什么好处？本项目旨在回答这些广泛的问题。它还着手绘制和典型化的各种类型的替代执法和人民司法已经出现在南非;建立多少合法性，公众的支持，并积极参与他们实际上享有不同阶层的人口;占的实质和这些民粹主义活动的形式;以确定它们破坏国家控制的程度暴力手段;并解释了为什么政府和南非警察局为建立合法的社区警务结构所做的努力往往失败得很惨，而非正式的社区执法却吸引了热情的、基础广泛的参与。最后，该项目将把南非在比较的角度来看，从而确定是否种类，原因和替代警务和人民司法的影响，这里是相同或不同的地方。 本研究以一个论断和两个工作论文开始。这种说法是，虽然人们广泛理解并将大规模诉诸各种形式的非正式警务描绘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态的产物，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，非常一般的工作论文：替代警务，报复性暴力和社区正义在南非的急剧上升-以及它们的形式和内容-是对行政权力下放和道德放松管制的过程的回应，这些过程伴随着新自由主义经济发展的增长，特别是对国家主权的影响。第二篇论文断言，在南非的替代性治安、报复性暴力和民众正义的核心中，或多或少可见的社会学动态是一种代际对抗，这种对抗是由黑人男性青年陷入与财产人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的两个地方：（a）西北、林波波和姆普马兰加省的农村和半农村地区，在这些地区，替代性治安的发展最为多样，并为调查工作奠定了基础;（B）开普敦的市区，在这些地区，可以看到各种各样的大众司法形式。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。

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.