Language of the unheard: police-recorded protests in South Africa, 1997–2013

Martin Bekker

Review of African Political Economy, 2022, vol. 49, issue 172, 226-245

Abstract: South Africa remains beset by protest. Notwithstanding an impressive literature, quantifying protests remains problematic; most attempts extrapolate from samples or media-derived data sets. Applying machine learning to the world’s largest publicly available, single-country public-event database – the South African Police Service’s Incident Registration Information System – the article classifies 150,000 events into type and levels of ‘tumult’. The author provides the first holistic picture of all police-reported protest in South Africa over a given period (1997–2013), showing a count increase (partly confirming the ‘rebellion of the poor’ thesis), while more nuanced measures (i.e. protestors per capita) demonstrate a less urban and tumultuous phenomenon than previously theorised.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2021.1953976

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Review of African Political Economy is currently edited by Graham Harrison, Branwen Gruffydd Jones, Claire Mercer, Nicolas Pons-Vignon, Aurelia Segatti and Ray Bush

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