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Critique of Anthropology
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Performers of Sovereignty

On the Privatization of Security in Urban South Africa

Thomas Blom Hansen

Department of Anthropology, Yale University

The police force was the most hated and visible representation of South Africa's apartheid state. The massive crime wave after 1994 and the new anxieties in a democratic South Africa have made security the primary concern in everyday life in the country. This article explores the paradoxes of policing, state violence and community involvement in security in a township in Durban. An important theme is the change of the symbolic locus of sovereignty from being a distant and impersonal state to becoming the local community in the township. The central proposition is that policing under democratic conditions is more complex and more imperative than before – both as performative and visible law-maintaining violence, as well as spectral and effective law-making violence.

Key Words: policing • private security • race • South Africa • sovereignty

Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 26, No. 3, 279-295 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0308275X06066583
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