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25 1 Security and Development in Postapartheid South Africa South Africa may have avoided a full-scale civil war as the apartheid system crumbled because of the commitment by the major parties to what was eventually a successful peace negotiation. The criminal violence of the post-1994 period, however, concentrated in the same communities already reeling from high levels of political violence, challenges the notion of a relatively peaceful transition. Indeed, as the writer Mike Nicol has commented, it could be argued that urban crime became a replacement for the civil war that never happened.1 Nicol’s observation, and the high crime rates that inform it, puts into question the extent to which security has become a reality for most South Africans and chronic underdevelopment a receding memory. Although formal apartheid itself began to fade almost immediately, this does not mean that South Africa entered a postconflict phase in 1994; rather, the nation continues to exist somewhere between war and peace. This chapter, divided into two sections, provides a brief overview of changes in governance in South Africa since 1994, as overtly political violence gave way to a “crime wave” and the new government turned its attention to the country’s considerable economic challenges. In the first section, I highlight some key moments in the arrival of neoliberalism to the country and its relationship to the socioeconomic and political challenges facing the nation. The section also includes a brief discussion of security governance, tracing its evolution from the apartheid era into the early postapartheid years. The discussion centers on a key moment in the evolution of postapartheid governance: the emergence of a war against crime. Combined with the shift to neoliberalism, the state’s approach to crime produced a distinct form of neoliberal governance with very clear South African characteristics but which nevertheless has much in common with variations found elsewhere; with respect to security specifically, the crucial bond between many forms of neoliberal governance is the repositioning 26 · Security AnD DeveloPment in PoStAPArtheiD South AfricA of crime from being a consequence of underdevelopment to representing , instead, the primary obstacle to development. Over the course of the following chapters, we see how this shift is articulated in Cape Town. The second section of the chapter introduces the city of Cape Town as seen through the lens of social and spatial inequality and examines the relationship between emerging forms of governance on national and local scales. Crime and development frame the challenges to South Africa’s transition away from totalitarianism and the legacy of unequal development in many ways. Major elections revolve around promises to tackle both head-on, and no serious political figure or party can avoid staking out bold positions on these issues. Ebrahim Rasool, the former premier for the Western Cape for the African National Congress, speaking just prior to the 2004 elections that gave his party control of the province for the first time, made clear that the ANC considered job creation, poverty, and crime the most pressing of the region’s problems.2 The initial promise of a balanced approach to crime and development, however, has fallen victim to numerous countervailing pressures, with the result that “fighting crime” has emerged not only as the principle security strategy for the city but also as a central development strategy. Central to this shift is the repositioning of Cape Town’s poor (and their communities), from victims and survivors of apartheid to problems, in this new aspiring world city.3 As will become clear, although the emerging relationships among crime, security, and development draw much of their vitality from the requirements of the market economy, the state played a central role in the early stages of the formation of postapartheid governance structures and processes. The consequences of real crime in the townships and the symbolic meanings of crime for economic transition and recovery were certainly decisive factors in those early days, but the state also had its own quite distinct interests in waging a war on crime. Given the extent to which antiapartheid resistance took the form of making townships ungovernable, a pressing concern of the new government was to reassert control over the urban peripheries and reestablish legitimacy through the invigoration of local governments.4 Faced with a distinct, and still forming , set of political and economic constraints and opportunities, as well as actual state capacity, the state’s efforts soon coalesced into a local variation of controlling and containing unrest in the peripheries on the one...

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