Neighborhood Cohesion and the Spatial Dynamics of Vigilante Violence in South Africa

• In Event: 144 - Regular Session. Interpersonal Violence

Abstract

The well-established literature on neighborhood cohesion and violence has documented that neighborhood cohesion reduces violence in communities through informal social control. The measures of violence typically employed in this work are homicide and assault, ignoring other forms of violence that communities may experience, like protest violence, political violence, civil war, terrorism, and vigilante violence. Furthermore, fundamental to understandings of how high levels of neighborhood cohesion yield less crime and violence is the assumption that residents of cohesive neighborhoods are able to translate that cohesion into informal social control, typically through accessing institutions like the police and court systems. This informal social control is assumed to be non-violent. If, however, a community with high levels of cohesion, and thus capacity for informal social control, also lacks the resources to channel their actions through effective legal avenues, it is possible that the collective action could take on illegal and violent means. In this paper, I examine the effects of neighborhood cohesion on incidents of vigilante violence, a violent form of informal social control. I use data from the Gauteng City-Region Observatory Quality of Life Survey, the 2011 South African Census, and an independently compiled database of newspaper articles detailing incidents of vigilante violence in Gauteng, South Africa from 2009-2013. I find that contrary to what might be assumed in the literature on neighborhood cohesion, crime, and violence, higher levels of neighborhood cohesion are actually associated with higher levels of vigilante violence.

Author

• Mark Gross, University of Maryland-College Park