States of Risk: policing, security, and abolition in South Africa, 1652-2022

Abstract

States of Risk: policing, security, and abolition in South Africa, 1652-2022 offers the first history of policing in South Africa that begins with its inception in 1652 and continues to the present day. Blending twenty-four months of ethnographic research inside private security companies in greater Johannesburg with archival research on colonial state records, missionary accounts, travelogues, newspapers, memoirs, and oral histories, it shows how the institution’s development was driven by successive political economic transformations—the creation of the plantation and the frontier, the abolition of slavery, the advent of industrialization, the invention of apartheid, the dawn of national liberation, and the onset of deindustrialization. Tracing how the latest of these transformations has given rise to the contemporary private security industry—one of the largest for-profit policing sectors in the world, it aims to show how the relationship between social control and racialization has always been globally heterogeneous. More specifically, it argues that the case of present-day South Africa—where a significant portion of the Black working class is not incarcerated but rather enlisted into private police work—troubles foundational assumptions about the relationship between race, social control, and the state in the field of carceral studies. In doing so, it argues that South Africa offers a window into the emerging character of racialization globally and key insights into what movements for police reform and abolition might look like in the Global South.