2013/01/01 by Karl von Holdt · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics #Legal Issues in South Africa #South African History and Culture
paper · doi:10.1080/03056244.2013.854040
openalex publication_date 2013/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
South Africa is torn between the persistence of an exclusionary socioeconomic structure marked by deep poverty and extreme inequality on the one hand, and on the other the symbolic and institutional rupture presented by the transition to democracy. This relationship produces a highly unstable social order in which intra-elite conflict and violence are growing, characterised by new forms of violence and the reproduction of older patterns of violence, a social order that can be characterised as violent democracy . I analyse three different forms of such violence – the struggle for control of the state institutions of coercion, assassination, and the mobilisation of collective violence. The prevailing forms of politics may shift quite easily between authoritarianism, clientelism and populism, and indeed exhibit elements of all three at the same time. Violent practices accompany each of these political forms, as violence remains a critical resource in a struggle for ascendancy which democratic institutions are unable to regulate.