The Rise of the Securocrats: The Case of South Africa by Jane Duncan (review)

For a brief moment in August 2012, the Marikana massacre drew international attention to police violence in South Africa. Faced with protesting mineworkers, police killed thirty-four people and injured a further seventy-eight. For Jane Duncan, Marikana was not an isolated incident, nor can it and other cases of police brutality be explained with reference to a few “rotten apples” in an otherwise ethical police force. Instead Marikana is an expression of a “tectonic shift” (4) in the role of the security services in South Africa, whereby the security forces are increasingly used to safeguard those in power—if necessary, at the expense of the people. This is the “rise of the securocrats”: officials located in the various security establishments—the police, the intelligence services, and the military—who have acquired the power to influence government policy in their favor. According to Duncan, the securocrats have become more powerful during the presidency of Jacob Zuma, and while democracy is still able to restrain their worst excesses, they nevertheless pose a significant risk to political freedom and human rights.

Theoretically, Duncan’s study is loosely anchored in a Copenhagen School perspective of security as constructed in speech acts. She also aligns herself with a Marxist perspective on the state and security as inevitably class biased, so that the capitalist state is destined to turn its security apparatus to a war against the underclass at times of economic recession. She thus advocates an antisecurity approach, according to which the concept of security does not signify a public service provided by the state but instead a mechanism through which political and economic power is maintained and reproduced.

This perspective yields valuable insights when applied to South Africa, although the theoretical framework at times threatens to overdetermine the evidence and smooth over some of the complexities, contradictions, and competitions within contemporary security sectors. That said, the book’s strength is undoubtedly its careful empirical documentation of the increasing power and presence of security in South Africa, both as a technology of rule and as a practice of repression. Part 1 of the book discusses the construction of security threats, and argues that despite the fact that South Africa does not face any substantive threats to its national security, the presence and power of the security cluster have increased. According to Duncan, “deliberate political decisions . . . have been taken to move South Africa towards a more repressive state” (273). This has involved a growing militarization of the police and an expanding domestic role for the military, as well as a growing centralization of control within the security cluster. The result is a “creeping militarisation of society, an expansion of the military-industrial complex, and a meshing of this complex with elite interests in society” (118).

Part 2 focuses on the regulation of protest and legal dissent, and documents an increasing criminalization of protest that began under the Mbeki administration and escalated under Zuma. The third and fourth parts of the book reveal Duncan’s disciplinary roots in journalism and media studies, and discuss the South African press coverage of the Marikana massacre and state control of broadcasting and Internet media. While far from seamlessly integrated within the overall argument of the book, these sections show that the print media often portray protests as socially deviant or criminal and display a class bias in favor of economic elites. The South African Broadcasting Service (SABC) is described as having been subjected to a pervasive strategy of neoliberalization, and hence a policy of “serv[ing] the ruling elite, especially an emerging predatory elite who could lose a great deal if the country had an independent, accessible public broadcaster” (223). Duncan also demonstrates a growing surveillance of private communication on the Internet and various social media, and shows how pervasive secrecy makes it difficult to ascertain the extent of South Africa’s capacity to spy on its...