Paret,
Marcel. 2018. “The Politics of Local Resistance in Urban South Africa: Evidence
from Three Informal Settlements.” International Sociology 33(3):
337-356.
Between
2009 and 2014, South Africa experienced widespread protests. In contrast to
prominent examples of global protest during the same period, they were
localized and did not push for broad political and economic transformation. To
explain these features, this article draws from three ethnographic and
interview-based case studies of local protest and organizing within informal
settlements in and around Johannesburg. The author argues that urban poverty and
the experience of market insecurity, on the one hand, and democratization and
the experience of state betrayal, on the other hand, gave rise to specific
political orientations. Residents responded to market insecurity by demanding
collective consumption for place-based communities, and they responded to state
betrayal by demanding fulfillment of a national liberation social contract
through administrative fixes. Both strategies confined activism to the local
level and limited broader challenges. The findings have implications for
research on both the urban poor and social movements.
