Is social cohesion relevant to a city in the global south: a case - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Is social cohesion relevant to a city in the global south: a case study of Khayelitsha

Vanessa Barolsky, Research Specialist

Democracy and Governance Programme Human Sciences Research Council

Purpose of the research

• Engage with the problem of violence and its relationship to

social cohesion

• Social cohesion – ‘the factors that hold society together’

(SA Presidency)

• Characteristics contribute to connectedness and solidarity

within democratic societies

• Give it “southern” content, critically interrogate it in local

and international versions utilising ethnography

• Bernard called it a “quasi‐concept”

2

Discourses of cohesion

• Major part of South African discourse since 2004 (post‐

apartheid fragmentation)

• Significant in international discourse since the 1990s
• Diagnosis and solution to fragmentation and diversity of

globalisation

• Social cohesion linked to violence through concept of

collective efficacy in criminological theory

• ‘social cohesion among neighbours combined with their

willingness to intervene on behalf of the ‘common good’’ (Sampson 1997)

• Can ‘protect’ citizens against violence

3

How relevant is the concept of social cohesion to the global south?

• Leading policy and academic work in the global north
• Shaped by the historical trajectories, forms of governance and

social relations particular to these locations

• Positivist orientations: Attempts to quantify this elusive ‘glue’
• Conditions of neighbourhood civility different to middle class

sociality imagined by northern scholars (Putnam)

• Concerns the very conditions of existence and defense of life
• Despite this being incorporated uncritically into policy by

countries such as SA

• In SA focus on consensus around ‘values’, may undermine the

space for democratic pluralism

4

Khayelitsha: a context for cohesion

• Investigated social cohesion in the context of Khayelitsha township

in the Western Cape

• Conditions in Khayelitsha part of a racialized and segregated urban

form created under apartheid but still in place (Gillespie 2014)

• Established in 1983 to ‘consolidate’ black settlement in the urban

areas of W Cape

• High levels of unemployment and poverty (income R2000)
• Murder rate above the national average of 31 per 100 000 (between

76 and 108 per 100 000)

5

6

Networks and organisation

• Not a ‘decline’ of social solidarity or social networks
• Multiple examples of individual and collective acts of

solidarity in ethnographic fieldwork My neighbours helped me in each and every step… They stood up for me. They love me and I love them (young orphaned woman)

• Numerous forms of informal social organisation
• Networks needed to survive poverty and repression
• Networks conduits for friendship and support and

exclusion and violence

7

Disputing law

• Deeply informal environment
• Informal networks‐social and symbolic resonance
• State envisages social cohesion as based on “civic nationalism”

in which the rule and norm of law in the Constitution founds solidarity

• Citizens dispute law explicitly and implicitly in numerous daily

illegalities

• Numerous sites of authority
• State law appears deferred, suspended
• ‘People of the law’, the police, are seen as contaminated and

corrupt

8

Communitarianism and individualism

• Western literature on social cohesion assumes people

are highly individualised

• Durkheim‐with modernity communitarianism replaced

by individualism

• SA‐tension between individualism and

communitarianism

• ‘individualism is in the head it is not in the blood’

(interviewee)

9

Mutuality

• In Khayelitsha, mutual relations between neighbours

appear to be the norm

• Not individual actors who ‘choose’ to intervene for the

‘common good’ as in Western contractarian thought

• This relation of mutuality is part of people’s identity
• Woven into the fabric of social life and social
• rganisation
• Implicitly informed by the ethics of Ubuntu
• Ethical personhood is realised through the collective

10

The dark side of mutual relations

• Indicator of social cohesion‐do you recognise strangers in

your neighbourhood?

• People in Khayelitsha ‘know’ each other but this ‘knowing’

can be a source of violent revenge

• Those who are identified as ‘criminals’ may be violently

and publically punished

• Those who report crime are known to those who commit

crime

• Relationships between neighbours lead to the violent

enforcement of a moral community against the ‘other’

11

Conclusion

• Social cohesion is useful for understanding the social fabric
• Can be appropriated for political projects
• How to create solidarity in a democratic nation‐state?
• How to balance unity and pluralism?
• Current global thinking limited by assumptions about the nature of

social, political and economic life

• Needs to be revisited to recognise the social context and practice of

subjects outside the ‘north’

• Re‐imagine solidarity in new democracies to take into account ethics

such as Ubuntu

• Recognises the violence and precariousness of life in contexts such as

Khayelitsha

12