Frequency and turmoil - South Africa’s community protests 2005–2017

• Published date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: 10.10520/EJC-d8bed5e59
• Author: Trevor Ngwane,Nicole van Staden,Peter Alexander,Boikanyo Moloto,Carin Runciman,Kgothatso Mokgele
• Date: 01 March 2018
• Record Number: iscrime_n63_a4
• Pages: 27-42

27

SA CRIME QUARTERLY NO. 63 • MARCH 2018

* Peter Alexander is director of the Centre for Social Change (CSC)

at the University of Johannesburg. Carin Runciman and Trevor

Ngwane are senior researchers with the CSC. Boikanyo Moloto,

Kgothatso Mokgele and Nicole van Staden are or were research

assistants with the CSC.

Frequency and

turmoil

South Africa’s community

protests 2005–2017

Peter Alexander, Carin Runciman,

Trevor Ngwane, Boikanyo Moloto,

Kgothatso Mokgele and Nicole van Staden*

palexander@uj.ac.za

crunciman@uj.ac.za

tngwane@uj.ac.za

b.r.moloto@gmail.com

kgothatsom@uj.ac.za

201473014@student.uj.ac.za

http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2413-3108/2018/v0n63a3057

Early discussions about South Africa’s high

level of popular unrest focused on ‘service

delivery protests’, but in recent years the

broader conception of ‘community protest’ has

gained currency, and we use it here.1 Whether

This article reports on the frequency and turmoil of South Africa’s community protests from 2005 to

2017, which, taken together, have been called a ‘rebellion’. It def‌ines ‘community protest’ as protests

in which collective demands are raised by a geographically def‌ined and identif‌ied ‘community’ that

frames its demands in support/and or defence of that community. It distinguishes between ‘violence’

and ‘disorder’, which has produced a novel three-way categorisation of turmoil, namely ‘orderly’,

‘disruptive’ and ‘violent’ protests. Drawing on the Centre for Social Change’s archive of media

reports, the largest database of its kind, and by comparing its data with details gleaned from the

police’s Incident Registration Information System (an unrivalled source of protest statistics), the article

reveals a rising trend in frequency of community protests and a tendency towards those protests

being disorderly, that is, disruptive and/or violent. In the process of advancing this position, the

authors offer a critique of other attempts to measure the number and turmoil of community protests.

one’s main interest in the phenomenon is with

social dynamics or with policy, a common

starting point must be assessment of scale.

We present evidence for two measures: total

‘frequency’ of protests, and what may be called

‘turmoil’. Turmoil is a loose term introduced

to encourage discussion between analysts

who utilise a range of concepts with different

def‌initions (such as riots, unrest incidents and

violent protests). When calculating turmoil, we

INSTITUTE FOR SECURITY STUDIES & UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

28

distinguish between orderly, disruptive and

violent protests, and our conclusion is that

community protests have occurred with growing

frequency and more disruption and violence

(or ‘disorder’ for short). We nuance this view,

though, by proposing that from a high point in

2012, the total number of these protests and

the number that was disorderly has f‌lattened

off somewhat.

Our assessment is based mainly on media

reports of protests archived by the University of

Johannesburg’s (UJ) Centre for Social Change

(CSC).2 We refer to these as media-reported

community protests (MRCPs). Robustness

of our calculations can be gauged through

contrast with other accounts, of which there

are two kinds. First, we look at estimates

based on South African Police Service (SAPS)

data, captured by its Incident Registration

Information System (IRIS). We provided a review

of IRIS and its statistics in South African Crime

Quarterly 58 (2016), and that article should

be regarded as a companion to the present

piece.3 Second, there are evaluations provided

by three other monitors utilising media data.

These are the Armed Conf‌lict Location and

Event Data Project (ACLED), the Civic Protests

Barometer (CPB), which is based at the

University of the Western Cape, and Municipal

IQ (MunIQ). Our engagement with these other

organisations’ appraisals necessarily involves

a critique and clarif‌ication of their concepts

and methodologies. This contributes a further

dimension to the article.

We begin with concepts, then deliberate on

methodologies, and, f‌inally, consider estimates

of protest frequency and extent of turmoil.

Community protests:

conceptualisation

Our research, a form of protest event analysis

(PEA), is quantitative, and requires def‌initions

that can be operationalised in a consistent

fashion. The f‌irst key concept is ‘protest’.

Drawing on international and local literature

and our own experiences and objectives,

we def‌ined this as ‘a popular mobilisation in

support of a collective grievance’.4 ‘Grievance’

conveys a sense of being wronged, without

this necessarily being clearly specif‌ied.

‘Popular’ means ‘of the people’ rather than

‘well supported’, and implies action by people

who are relatively marginal. Our theorisation

consciously excluded battles between taxi

associations, gangs, and the like; that is,

between forces with similar status.5

We use the term ‘community’ in reference to

protests related to a geographically identif‌ied

area.6 This should not be taken to imply that

‘communities’ are homogeneous, and we are

acutely aware that sometimes only a certain

section of a community participates in a protest

(often the unemployed). A ‘community protest’

is def‌ined as a protest in which collective

demands are raised by a geographically

def‌ined and identif‌ied ‘community’ that frames

its demands in support and/or defence of

that community. Community protests are

distinguished from those with other foci, which

we have termed ‘labour-related’, ‘crime-related’

and so forth. The notion of ‘community protest’

is broader than ‘service delivery protest’. The

latter term, frequently used by journalists in

South Africa, tends to conceal the complexity

of issues that communities raise, which often

include criticisms of South Africa’s democracy.

Furthermore, the SAPS, the Department of

Cooperative Governance and the South African

Local Government Association (SALGA) are

now using the term ‘community protest’.7

Our approach differs to that of other

databases. Table 1 encapsulates aspects of

various measurements of community protests.8

It contrasts our database of MRCPs with

(a) IRIS, (b) our IRIS-derived police-recorded

community protests (PRCPs), (c) ACLED,