Unstable solidarities: the uses and abuses of “community” in the context of penal violence in South Africa

Gail Super

Chapter 16 in Handbook on Politics and Society, 2025, pp 294-309 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter examines the political and discursive work of the term community in legitimating populist forms of penal violence in Masiphumelele, a Black township in Cape Town, South Africa. Combining Girard's scapegoat theory with critical legal scholarship on the violence of law, it argues that technologies of violence are central to the creation and re-creation of the myth on which the supposedly moral (and non-violent) orders of law and community rest. In fact, penal violence produces a negative intimacy that is ultimately unsustainable. The fiction of unanimity legitimates collective penal violence in the same way that state violence is legitimated (through law) on the grounds of preserving order for a supposedly homogeneous social body. Thus, just as the myth of community justifies law, so too does law justify community. In this case study, the violence inflicted in the name of community shared the point of departure of individualized liberal punishment, and was based on a retributive concept of justice.

Keywords: Violence; Community; Scapegoating; South Africa; Punishment; Vengeance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035301898
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