Neighborhood Cohesion, Collective Efficacy, and Vigilante Violence in South Africa

• In Event: Community Structures, Social Organization, and Crime

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 translate cohesion into non-violent informal social control. However, in contexts in which those institutional 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 examine the effects of neighborhood cohesion and collective efficacy on incidents of vigilante violence in the South African province of Gauteng, the country’s most populous province that includes the city of Johannesburg. I use large-scale survey data that is representative at the ward-level and an independently compiled database of newspaper articles detailing incidents of vigilante violence in Gauteng. I find that higher levels of neighborhood cohesion and collective efficacy result in more incidents of vigilante violence, even when controlling for concentrated disadvantage, the percent of owner occupied homes, and the percent foreign-born.

Author

• Mark Gross, Brown University