IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/revape/v42y2015i143p107-123.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Violence and democracy in South Africa's community protests

Author

Listed:
  • Marcel Paret

Abstract

Community protests in South Africa are often described as violent. Drawing from newspaper articles, interviews with protesters and statements by public officials, this paper unpacks the meaning of 'violent protest'. It shows that violence is both ambiguous and deeply entangled with democracy. On the one hand, violent practices may become a tool of liberation, promoting democracy by empowering marginalised groups. On the other hand, democracy may become a tool of domination, undermining dissent by constituting as violent those persons and actions that deviate from formal institutional channels. The analysis urges scholars to adopt a critical and nuanced view of violence.

Suggested Citation

  • Marcel Paret, 2015. "Violence and democracy in South Africa's community protests," Review of African Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 42(143), pages 107-123, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:revape:v:42:y:2015:i:143:p:107-123
    DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2014.995163
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03056244.2014.995163
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/03056244.2014.995163?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sarah Day & Mohamed Seedat & Josephine Cornell & Shahnaaz Suffla, 2019. "A multimodal reading of public protests," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 37(6), pages 1005-1023, September.
    2. Koelble, Thomas A., 2018. "The politics of violence and populism in post-colonial democracy: The role of political society in South Africa," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Democracy and Democratization SP V 2018-102, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:revape:v:42:y:2015:i:143:p:107-123. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CREA20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.