The South African Transition: From Development to Security?
Steffen Jensen,
Steffen Jensen
Roskilde University, PO Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark ( [email protected] ) and is a fellow at Wiser in Johannesburg.
Search for more papers by this authorSteffen Jensen,
Steffen Jensen
Roskilde University, PO Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark ( [email protected] ) and is a fellow at Wiser in Johannesburg.
Search for more papers by this authorThe research for this article has been made possible by grants from the Danish Council for Development Research and the Danish Research Council for the Social Sciences. Lars Buur, Simon Turner, Peter Gibbon, Finn Stepputat and Henrik Rønsbo all commented on earlier versions of the paper. Finally the anonymous referees provided important inputs in the final phases of writing the article.
Abstract
This article questions some recent analyses which claim that global neo-liberal discourses are disseminated to shift the focus away from development towards a greater emphasis on security issues. Taking as its point of departure the analysis of empirical material from Cape Town, the article shows that security and development in South Africa were never separate concerns. After the ANC came to power in 1994 there was an effort to boost development efforts rather than security. However, these efforts were soon dwarfed by local circumstances, notably the pressure from local state employees who felt their jobs and lives to be under threat from the townships, and the changing nature of violence in the city. The first part of the article details the practices and discourses of state agencies; the second section analyses the consequences of reconfigured security and development concerns for the production of political subjectivity in South Africa's townships.
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