Development, Social Justice and Global Governance: challenges to implementing restorative and criminal justice reform in South Africa

• Jurisdiction: South Africa
• Pages: 113-133
• Published date: 15 August 2019
• Citation: 2007 Acta Juridica 113
• Date: 15 August 2019
• Author: Tony Roshan Samara

Part II

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE, CRIME AND

(IN)SECURITY IN AFRICA

Development, Social Justice and Global

Governance: challenges to implementing

restorative and criminal justice reform

in South Africa

TONY ROSHAN SAMARA*

George Mason University

I INTRODUCTION

Attempts at implementing institutional transformations in criminal

justice systems face a number of, thus far, nearly insurmountable

obstacles. This paper examines one specif‌ic set of challenges having to do

with governmentality and the practice of urban governance in the

post-Cold War era. It is my contention that governmentality and its

practice, as they are constituted today, act as impediments to the

implementation of restorative justice in South Africa. The paper is

divided into two sections. The f‌irst is a discussion of governance and

governmentality at the global scale. The second addresses the importance

of examining these as they are expressed at the level of the city. It begins

with a case study of urban renewal in Cape Town that is meant to

illustrate a particular manifestation of post-Cold War governmentality at

the local/municipal level, and concludes with a discussion of the

challenges this governmentality poses to the implementation of restor-

ative justice.

The case study intends to make clear that attempts at criminal justice

reform, including restorative justice, potentially contradict the dominant

tendencies in the contemporary practice of governance at the global,

national and local scales, as well as the discursive f‌ield from which it

* MA (Sociology) (University of California) MA(Liberal Studies) (City University of New

York) Ph.D (Sociology) (University of California). Assistant Professor of Sociology, Depart-

ment of Sociology and Anthropology,George Mason University, USA.

113

2007 Acta Juridica 113

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derives. In short, efforts at institutionalising progressive reforms will face

resistance – both active and passive – when they challenge the exercise of

power by state and dominant non-state actors as these attempt to realise a

particular vision for the post-Cold War social landscape. This conf‌lict is

and will continue to be particularly pronounced at the scale of the city,

which urban studies scholars have identif‌ied as a growing site of political

contestation in the global system.

1

Global governance denotes the practice of deepening, extending and

securing a version of globalisation in which ‘free markets’ and liberal

democratic institutions are the primary ordering principles of social life

on a global scale. The obvious, and basic, disagreement is over whether

this brand of global governance is a normative or relatively non-

normative process; more pointedly, whether it is to some extent the

continuation of the Cold War by other means or whether it is a

multi-lateral administrative mechanism for realising, or moving closer to,

some form of global democracy.

The distance between these two positions is of great geopolitical

importance, but for my purposes here I will simply make the modest

claim that the terrain of global governance is indeed a contested one, and

that at present a neoliberal democratic, neo-realist governmentality

(neo-neo) enjoys a position of relative strength and unity globally –

institutionally, politically, militarily, and discursively – that before was

limited largely to the regions of the West.

2

Globalisation is thus best

understood as the diffusion of the inf‌luence this position of strength

affords across all spheres (social, cultural, economic, political/military) on

a global scale, the conf‌lict this diffusion engenders (eg anti-globalisation)

and the new geopolitical realities that arise from this conf‌lict (eg

transnationalism, the ‘war on terrorism’, etc).

The implications of this process for transformations in the practice of

criminal justice are signif‌icant. This now globalised governmentality

ideologically positions social justice as a right in theory (eg human rights),

but one which is realised in practice as the end product of other processes,

namely the implementation of free markets, the institutionalisation of

liberal democracy and the maintenance of order, through the creation

and enforcement of relevant legislation, for example. In this context,

governance is concerned primarily with the implementation of the

neo-neo agenda – a neoliberal market economy secured through a

neo-realist approach to producing a stable global order – while the

1

H Leitner et al Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers (2007); N Smith ‘New globalism,

new urbanism: gentrif‌ication as global urban strategy’ (June 2002) 4(3) Antipode 427.

2

P Wilkin ‘Global poverty and orthodox security’(2002) 23(4) Third World Quarterly 633;

C Gordon ‘Governmental rationality: an introduction’ in G Burchell et al (eds) The Foucault

Effect: Studies in Governmentality (1991) 1.

114 RESTORATIVE JUSTICE:POLITICS,POLICIES AND PROSPECTS

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