'I can do things that others can't': Civic policing as weaponized volunteering in eThekwini, South Africa

In this article, we analyse civic policing in post-apartheid South Africa as a form of 'weaponized volunteering'. We use 'weaponized volunteerism' as a conceptual lens to refer to practices that rest on the potentiality and/or willingness to use physical violence or to harness the physical violence of others under the guise of 'volunteer work'. By drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted by both authors in eThekwini, South Africa, we show that by framing civic policing as weaponized volunteerism, we are able to analyse the violence at the core of policing and underline the varied ways that violence work is harnessed and expanded through civic policing, in the interest of civic and state actors. This, in turn, allows us to explore the continuum between state and civic violence, which is often directed towards similar groups and individuals.

Corporate sovereignty: Negotiating permissive power for profit in Southern Africa

The growing engagement with sovereignty in anthropology has resulted in a range of concepts that encapsulate how various (non-state) actors execute power. In this paper, we further unpack the concept of ‘corporate sovereignty’ and outline its conceptual significance. Corporate sovereignty refers to performative claims to power undertaken by (individuals aligned to) corporate entities with profit-making objectives within a state-sanctioned space. This contrasts with claims made by other (non-state) actors who operate in a permissive space that (regularly) lacks this legally grounded relationship with the state. By unpacking this state-sanctioned permissive space and highlighting the role of the state as the arbiter, our approach to corporate sovereignty offers a new comparative analytical perspective to theorize how sovereignty is performed and opens ethnographic avenues to explore how sovereignty is negotiated and co-produced across diverse localities. To elucidate our argument, we draw from ethnographic fieldwork conducted on coal mining companies in Mozambique and private security companies in South Africa. By focusing on cases that differ, we want to show the multitude of ways in which corporate sovereignty is enacted and takes shape.

‘Why Do We Need Your Research?’

The anthropology of security is slowly developing into a substantial sub-discipline of anthropology, yet there are only a few works that elaborate on how the research on security is conducted, what ethical issues emerge in this process, and how this differs from research on other topics due to the sensitive, political, and highly controversial nature of security itself. In this paper, we aim to contribute to this scholarly debate by providing a reflexive account of some of our experiences in researching security across various cases and sites. More specifically, we aim to flesh out the ethical dimensions that, we argue, are inherent to any analysis of security. We do so by focusing on two issues, namely, how we do research (including methods and access to the field site) and how we can or are expected to share our research findings (including public engagement and access to data). By drawing from our own experiences, we aim to show that these are complex matters that underline the sensitive nature of security and call for further empirical and theoretical elaboration.

Book Review Karpiak, Kevin G. and William Garriott, eds. 2018. The Anthropology of Police. London & New York: Routledge

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"It's All About the Body": The Bodily Capital of Armed Response Officers in South Africa

In this article, I analyze the role of bodily capital in the daily policing practices of armed response officers, a specific type of private security officers, in Durban, South Africa. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that the masculinized bodily capital of armed response officers is a key source of their sovereign power; it plays a central role in how they acquire and exert authority. Furthermore, I argue that an analysis of bodily capital should not solely analyze the actual flesh of the body, but must include particular equipment (such as bulletproof vests and firearms) that is experienced as a part of the body.