This chapter has three aims. First, to place violence in South Africa and social responses to it within the interpretive framework of Foucault's theory concerning power and socio-medical knowledge, and to identify the implications that this structuralist approach has for…
While many may argue that violence of any sort is reprehensible, this paper has an underlying premise that collective violence is generally a form of collective action used as a last resort by actors of social movements who believe their grievances have not, or cannot, be dealt with through other methods of collective action. Collective violence, this paper contends, cannot be seen as separate from other forms of collective action; it often arises when more peaceful forms of protest fail, and intensifies in response to the repressive actions of the state.
This paper analyses the future role of self-defence units (SDUs). It includes an overview of the historical background of informal "community policing" structures.
This paper examines the fraught issue of access to the records of intelligence, security and law enforcement agencies. The dilemmas which this topic poses are at the cutting edge of the tensions between the rights of access to information and those of privacy.
This paper describes drive-by shootings as a form of terrorism and examines how drive-by shootings, attacks on train commuters, customers at shebeens or participants in a night vigil appear to be terrorist tactics that have developed in the context of "self-help war." It emphasises that they are highly effective, military types of attacks that require perpetrators to have reasonable information at their disposal, as well as competence in planning and the use of firearms.
This paper demonstrates that the search for mono-causal explanations of violence in South Africa is fruitless. The convenient terms in which the violence has been labelled, by politicians and the commercial media, often does more to disguise complex causation than it does to explain it.