Marikana: The Politics of Law & Order in Post-apartheid South Africa -- Suren Pillay

Tweet http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/2012916121852144587.html

EXCERPT:

In the city of Cape Town where I live, where the Democratic Alliance is in power, the administration is drawing more and more on the discredited policy of zero tolerance policing which emerges from the United States. It is an approach widely associated with the criminalisation of racial minorities like African-Americans and Latinos, who make up the bulk of the offenders in US jails. 

Rather than criminalise a minority, when that kind of thinking is transferred to South Africa, we end up criminalising the majority. Mostly alarmingly, the Premier of the Western Cape renewed a call last heeded under the State of Emergency of the 1980s, for military troops to be sent into townships, this time to deal with gangsterism. 

We have to be concerned with the proliferation of punitive actions to transform social behaviour. Should these be the guiding ethos of a new form of citizenship we want to cultivate? Up to now, there has been great cynicism about the lack of capacity to implement the growing plethora of regulatory laws and administer them efficiently, which tended to ensure that their bark could never really become their bite, beyond certain geographical spaces in the city. Then came Marikana.

Whilst law is celebrated as the highest form of civilisation in some circles, we should also recall that the history of law is entwined with colonial conquest and rule, and complicates the legitimacy of certain legal traditions in most of the formerly colonised world. 

Law was not only an expression of the codification of order, but also the expression of the imposition of liberal conduct and of liberal paternalism. The rule of law and constitutionalism, scholar James Tully tell us, drawing on the Australian experience, is not a culturally neutral set of ideas, but is rather the hegemonic imposition of a set of norms which originate in colonial conquest and are imposed on subject populations in order to transform their behaviour to produce what we might call good modern subjects. 

We should recall that the early justifications of colonial rule were based on doing good for the native by, for example outlawing "barbaric practices" in India and Africa in order to civilise them. 

My point is not to celebrate these outlawed practices, but to point out that liberalism has historically relied on law to enact its paternalism on populations in order to transform their conduct into what is seen as the good subject and good citizen, who acts and thinks in a particular way. From the liberal vantage point, this is celebrated. 

In our present context, this liberal paternalism now seems to be running rampant as the only way in which political authority can transform our conduct. This leads to the proliferation of rules, not the proliferation of debate and dialogue or of engagements designed to transform through alternative modes of self-regulation.