‘Taking the law into our own hands’: Community cohesion and vigilante violence in South Africa

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 13. Policing and Surveillance in Public and Private Spaces

Abstract

While the role of neighborhood cohesion and collective efficacy in reducing crime and violence is understood to be a result of a community’s capacity to engage in informal social control, this body of research assumes informal social control to be non-violent. This assumption may hold in settings where communities have access to institutional avenues and supports through which they can channel cohesion and collective efficacy into non-violent informal social control. However, in contexts in which those institutional and infrastructural avenues are absent or inaccessible, the capacity for informal social control that neighborhood cohesion generates may be the capacity for violent informal social control. In this paper, I draw on 89 in-depth interviews to examine neighborhood cohesion and collective efficacy and make the case that collective efficacy actually facilitates vigilante violence under certain conditions. When coupled with weak institutional and infrastructural support, the collective informal social control potential that defines collective efficacy, can yield violent outcomes.

Author

• Mark Gross, Cabrini University