Conflicts as disasters: translating violent conflict in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Throughout the 1980s and until the early 1990s, thousands of Mozambicans

fled the civil war raging in their country for South Africa. The apartheid regime

of South Africa reacted by forcefully and violently repatriating the Mozambican

refugees as ‘illegal aliens’ (Wa Kabwe-Segatti 2002). This militarised and politi- cised response to the population displacement that resulted from violent con- flict was symptomatic of the politics of state violence under apartheid. Fifteen years later, in May 2008, when xenophobic violence was ignited throughout South Africa, the post-apartheid government provided humanitarian assis- tance and set up temporary refugee camps to offfer some protection to the thousands of displaced victims (Igglesden, Polzer, and Monson 2009). In brief, it came to manage a ‘disaster’, instead of responding with ‘arms’ to this violent conflict. As a new democracy, South Africa had experienced a range of institu- tional transformations over the preceding few years, but this did not necessar- ily entail institutions involved in such emergency situations. The nature of conflict had also changed: from civil strife to daily violence and social protest (Harris 2003), rooted in a contention about the politics of the state and con- tinuous inequality and exclusion (Alexander 2010). The emergence of violent conflict on a large scale thus posed a serious challenge to government and soci- ety in the new South Africa: who should deal with such situations, and what should be done? This chapter seeks to examine why the government managed this 2008 crisis as a disaster, in particular by using tools and techniques of disaster manage- ment, which came to be the institution employed to protect the population against disruptive events. It is puzzling that disaster management, which was developed under apartheid to protect white South Africans from black ‘threats’, would turn into a mechanism – though limited in many ways – to protect black foreigners against the high level of xenophobia and racism in South Africa ). Moreover disaster management is today mainly concerned with providing relief and taking preventive measures against floods, fires, and major accidents. In this chapter I suggest that the transformation of both the institution and the situation it seeks to address took place in the con- text of a democratic transition, such that social disruption eventually came to be seen as disaster. A double translation is at stake here: one in the institutions dealing with the protection of civilians that led to the establishment of ‘disas- ter management’, and another translation in the object of this protection. This is from a large-scale social conflict to a disaster, which raises questions about the social and political implications of this translation.