Gail Super, Governing through Crime in South Africa
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Author | Steffen Jensen |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474514530050 |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
insight, makes an important contribution and should constitute an important
market rating.
Edyta Drzazga
Faculty of Law and Administration, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
Gail Super, Governing through Crime in South Africa, Ashgate Publishing: Farnham and Burlington,
2013; 182 pp. (including index): 9781409444749, £54.00
In her book, Governing through Crime in South Africa, criminologist Gail Super
aims to explore the intersection between crime and governance in post-apartheid
South Africa. In this way her ambition resembles other attempts at understanding
the post-apartheid moment and how one of its arguably most serious problems,
crime, was handled. However, in much of the literature the apartheid era is
assumed to be known and a constant of grotesque forms of policing aimed only
at protecting White rule. Super in no way contradicts this view but she is clever
enough to know that we can only know the post-apartheid moment if we also
understand what happened in the years before. Hence, her book explores the
period between 1976 and 2004. This allows her to understand both the present
and how policing and governance have shifted; only by looking critically at the
entire period can we understand change and continuities. What this analysis tells us
is the rather worrying truth that maybe apartheid policing was not so different
from democratic policing. Despite our attempts to identify a moment of absolute
difference, apartheid policing was preoccupied with many of the same things as
post-apartheid policing. With Super we might say that both apartheid and post-
apartheid policing were more policing than they were apartheid or post-apartheid.
Super positions her book within a Foucauldian inspired analytics of power,
which has spread to much of critical criminology as a contrast to more traditional
criminological approaches concerned with crime patterns, statistics on crime and
profiling to mention but a few areas. Contrary to this view, Super is more interested
in what we might call the politics of policing. This approach yields a different kind
of insight. Through her analysis we begin to understand patterns in policies around
crime, for instance the so-called neo-liberalization that took off before the fall of
apartheid and has continued into post-apartheid South Africa. This is of course
part of a global movement and Super’s book reads almost as the South African
version of a global governing through crime. So what does she tell us?
Through five chapters and an epilogue, Super takes us through different the-
matic issues relating to crime and governance. All chapters are ordered chrono-
logically to allow for an understanding of the shifts and continuities in the
governance and politics of crime. In Chapter 2, she explores how crime emerged
as a problem before and after the fall of apartheid. She concludes that while it was
often the same people – young poor men from the townships – who were targeted,
the reading of them was very different from politically motivated violence to the
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