De- And Recomposing Collective Violence: Explaining Xenophobic Riots in Post-Apartheid South Africa

A wide range of explanations have been put forward by the South African as well as the international research community to account for recurrent waves of so called “xenophobic attacks” against allegedly foreign nationals: the re-enactement of colonial insider-outsider group relations, a failing asylum system and an ineffective border control management, relative deprivation and inequality, resource competition, unemployment and high levels of poverty are just some of the explanations offered. This paper aims to challenge such conceptual schemes and monolithic concepts and argues with regard to the countrywide xenophobic riots of 2008 for a different methodological approach which highlights the importance of de- and recomposing rioting as a complex, diverse, dynamic and interactive process. Since the collapse of apartheid as official state ideology of South Africa in 1994 numerous scholars and civil rights organizations have consistently pointed to widespread and permeating anti-foreign sentiments within the South African population. Alongside these widespread anti-foreign attitudes among the South African citizenry, South Africa has also turned into a dangerous place and from time to time even into a killing field for mainly African non-nationals, but also for Bengalis, Pakistanis and some other ethnic minority groups living in the country. The most intense and closely-knit of these recurrent xenophobic outbreaks took place in 2008, 2015 and in 2019, which have, taken together, resulted in more than 80 deaths, tens of thousands of internally displaced people and in property destruction worth of some hundred million Rands. This kind of complex rioting behavior demands for a methodological approach that consists of decomposing and recomposing. To decompose means to fragment a larger riot episode into several smaller, simultaneous mini-riots and to disaggregate the riot reality into a more limited temporal and spatial frame. The method of increasing the number of observations by multiplying and subdividing the three week lasting riot of 2008 into smaller units of analysis will show the considerable heterogeneity in terms of precipitants, initiators, organization, attacks, targets and temporal rhythms of this riot episode and therefore add valuable information to our understanding of rioting behavior more general. After having decomposed the riot into several smaller subevents for analytical purposes, it’s the time for recompose it again into a whole in order to capture the various possibilities of overarching linkages and patterns between these dispersed and asynchronous incidents of xenophobic rioting that upset the country in 2008 for the first, but sadly not the last time.