South Africa’s Protest Architecture: Foundations of Collective Action

• In Event: Citizen Participation & Protest in South Africa

Abstract

‘Contentious politics’, as coined by Tilly and Tarrow (2015), has become a prominent frame of South Africa’s state-society relationship since the mid-2000s, through the proliferation of popular protest. This article builds on the concept by the authors of the ‘architecture of protest’ (Brooks, Chikane and Mottiar, 2023), to describe the sectors and spaces of collective action that have come to characterise the dominant types and arenas of popular protest, in which the state has been largely the target. Through a survey of existing protest data, media reports, and trends in contentious politics post-1994, this article provides an outline of South Africa’s protest architecture – its pillars, scaffolding, and foundations. This framework encapsulates a multiplicity of actors and issues. Yet, as suggested by the term ‘architecture’, there is also a presence of design. The article shows how the multiplicity of protest spaces have been constructed, inhabited, and sometimes re-designed or appropriated, as means of demanding change. Their underpinnings, borne of both the continued legacy of apartheid and the disappointments of the post-1994 era, provide the structural foundations and mutual reinforcements for the continued reconstitution of popular action.

Author

• Heidi Brooks, University of the Witwatersrand