Abstract
The police force was the most hated and visible representation of South Africa's apartheid state. The massive crime wave after 1994 and the new anxieties in a democratic South Africa have made security the primary concern in everyday life in the country. This article explores the paradoxes of policing, state violence and community involvement in security in a township in Durban. An important theme is the change of the symbolic locus of sovereignty from being a distant and impersonal state to becoming the local community in the township. The central proposition is that policing under democratic conditions is more complex and more imperative than before – both as performative and visible law-maintaining violence, as well as spectral and effective law-making violence.
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