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

像许多其他国家一样，南非目前正受到“义勇军”流行的困扰，这个词错误地识别了许多不同种类的替代警察、报复性暴力和民众司法。为什么刑事反暴力会如此迅速地上升，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与国家支持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？这个项目试图回答这些广泛的问题。它还着手绘制和标明南非出现的各种替代执法和民众司法；确定它们在不同人口阶层中实际享有多少合法性、公众支持和积极参与；对这些民粹主义活动的实质和形式进行说明；确定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创建合法社区警务结构的努力往往失败得很厉害，而非正式社区执法却吸引了热情和广泛的参与。最后，该项目将从比较的角度看待南非，从而确定这里的替代警务和民众司法的种类、原因和影响是否与其他地方相同或不同。这项研究以一个断言和两个工作论文开始。他们断言，尽管人们普遍认为，群众诉诸各种形式的非正式警务是对社会混乱现实的务实回应，但它也是一种越来越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上的必要性中。这提出了我们的第一个非常笼统的工作命题：另类警务、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--是对伴随着新自由主义经济发展的增长而出现的行政权力下放和道德放松进程的回应，特别是它对国家主权的影响。第二篇论文断言，在南非，另类警察、报复性暴力和民众正义的核心或多或少明显的社会学动态是一种代际对立，这种对立是由黑人男性青年陷入与有产者的暴力斗争而加剧的。民族志和纪录片研究将集中在南非的两个地方：(A)农村和半农村的西北部、林波波省和穆普马兰加省，那里的替代警察发展最多样，已经为调查工作奠定了基础；和(B)开普敦的城区，在那里可以看到各种受欢迎的司法形式。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的论文和一本书。

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.