The Agonistic City?

State-Society Strife in Johannesburg

Li Pernegger

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781786999092
  9781786999092
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786999054
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Demokratie

An exploration of Johannesburg's post-apartheid's city administration's governance of conflict from 1996 to the current day, in the case of service delivery protests and shifts in city policy. The author, Li Pernegger, focuses in-depth on the water wars in Orange Farm, insurgent informal traders in the inner city, and the billing battle fought by the middle class.

This book provides deep insights into facets of protests: from the local state's qualification of the conflicts; its portrayals of protestors; its agonistic and antagonistic responses to protestors' claims; to power dynamics and the forms of agreement reached.

Pernegger considers what the practical prospects of agonism might be for the local government to regard city strife in its practices of governance as a constructive – rather than destructive – force for change, and the realisation of democratic ideals for its ordinary citizens.

1

Strife and the state

Urban uprising

The rise in protests and scale of activism in recent years is seemingly unprecedented. While the uprisings associated with the Arab Spring targeted autocratic leaders, many others have happened in contexts of democratic rule. These include the actions of the Occupy Movement in Western Europe and North America starting in 2011, large-scale protests in Brazil in 2013 and again in 2015 and 2016, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014, and the Yellow Vests Movement in France in 2018. The service delivery protests in South Africa, which are now almost endemic, have also happened in the context of a liberal democracy, albeit one that is recently established.

Before the 1990s, most scholarly texts on dissensus (the polar opposite to what a liberal democracy based on consensus hopes to achieve) focused on the role of protest in confronting authoritarian rule, including in colonial Africa, military-ruled Latin America and state-socialist Eastern Europe. This literature is large and varied and addresses political, psychological and sociological dimensions of the conflicts, largely outside democratic contexts (Diani and McAdam 2003; Hagopian 1974; Smelser 1962; Tanter and Midlarsky 1967). The targeting of democracies by protestors in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis presents a new challenge to academic scholarship, raising questions of why people go to the streets when the options of democratic process are available, even if these processes have become increasingly blunt tools to address protesters’ frustrations. An emergent scholarship suggests that recent protests signal discontent with rising social inequality but also with an apparent failure of the democratic system to address this inequality (Byrne 2012; della Porta and Mattoni 2014). Indeed, citizens’ trust in the democratic state may be at a near all-time low; in a survey of 87 countries, 80 per cent of protests between 2006 and 2013 targeted the state in some way (Ortiz et al. 2013). Many protests voice discontent with the performance of democratically elected government rather than with the system itself, but there is a growing risk that this dissatisfaction may turn into a battle against the institutions of democracy (Byrne 2012; Gaon 2010; Heller and Evans 2011; Little 2008; Marinova 2011; Moreno 2011). While democracies are familiar with challenge and conflict, the nature and vehemence of recent protests is perplexing for many governments. Liberal democracy includes rules of engagement through which conflict is channelled and norms of consensus-seeking that work to moderate or resolve dissensus. However, much of the conflict in recent times has challenged the social contract underpinning liberal democracy and bewildered authorities have handled these conflicts poorly. Only rarely have governments drawn on conflict in productive ways, thereby benefiting from the wider creative input of residents in tackling difficult problems.

There is a further feature of contemporary protest that warrants mention: most recent protests have been urban in character, with scenes of popular anger unfolding in cities under varying shades of democratic governance as diverse as Paris, São Paulo, Singapore, Tokyo, London, Rome, Jakarta, La Paz, Singapore, Juba, Hong Kong and Johannesburg. The protests are often led not by the most spatially (or socially) marginalised groups living in rural areas, but by urban students and youth whose aspirations are frustrated by societal inequalities. The local-level state has become the new ground zero for resident dissatisfaction, and studies of conflict need to engage more centrally with the local interface between state and society.

Agonism in democratic conflict management

If we are concerned with defending the historical gains of democracy, we must find a different way to think about conflict’s prominence in democracy, perhaps even find a positive approach to conflict. This is potentially offered in the notion of agonism, most famously and most recently associated with the work of the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe.

Mouffe’s (2000) agonism, namely the conflict between adversaries, which mutually and respectfully recognise the legitimacy of each other’s view, is seen as a positive force for change that potentially produces outcomes beneficial to ordinary citizens. In agonism’s constructive embrace of conflict, Mouffe (2000) places contestation, rather than only cooperation, at the heart of democratic governance. She defends democracy by expanding the idea of democracy beyond liberal notions of engagement to include conflicts that do not conform in easy ways to agreed rules and procedures. In this sense, the activists of the Occupy Movement or service delivery protests are involved in democratic action, just as the political parties contesting an election are. A democratic state that embraces agonism (an agonistic state for short) accepts that conflict, including protests outside procedurally prescribed frameworks, is a potentially creative and constructive force for continued democratic advancement. An agonistic state keeps the space open for expressions of dissensus rather than trying to sidestep conflict through formal consensus-seeking mechanisms.

Agonism requires us to think differently about dissensus within contexts of democratic governance. However, translating agonism into actual governance practices is complex and risky. There is arguably a fine line between dissensus that deepens democracy, expanding the space for practices that challenge social inequities and inequalities, and dissensus that erodes democracy by deepening societal division. Even Mouffe has battled with this, shifting position from a hard agonism in which consensus-seeking means the closure of democratic space to a softer agonism that accepts the need for some points of consensual closure even while sustaining the space for future dissensus. This repositioning has made her version of democracy similar to an aggregative democratic one, where policy is implemented based on the highest number of supporters (Crowder 2006; Yamamoto 2017).

We must remember that the idea of agonism has emerged largely within the apparently stable democratic contexts of Western Europe, and not in places such as postcolonial Africa and the post-dictatorships of Latin America where many institutions of democracy are newer and more fragile, and where physical violence in state–society conflict seems closer to the surface than in longer-established democracies. Theoretical work is useful in drawing out the meanings and principles of agonism, but much of the understanding of the practical possibilities will come from identifying agonism in practice in a variety of contexts, including those in established liberal democracies and where democratic transitions have been more recent. My research explores the practical possibilities of applying the concepts of agonism to the state’s governance practices in cases of state–society strife. This includes identifying the ways in which agonism appears in practice, based on the understanding of agonism as situated, fluid and emergent routines (Mintzberg and Waters 1985; Ricks and Charlesworth 2003).

The risk in using a concept such as agonism is that varied and hybrid governance practices with different origins and purposes will be deductively collected under a single term. To avoid this, providing complex, detailed, well-contextualised and nuanced accounts of evolving practices at a local level is necessary. While seeking out practices that may inform a discussion on agonism, some of these practices might not be deliberately agonistic, or might be only partly agonistic, or might be agonistic only temporarily, but they do speak to the limits and possibilities of an agonistic state.

Another risk is using the shorthand of ‘the state’, perhaps too loosely in this book, to denote the state, including all its different administrative and political parts. Big debates and extensive scholarship unpacking ‘the state’ abound. It may be tempting to reduce the state to a single cohesive, unitary concept, but in reality it is multifaceted and complex. The state finds it difficult to adopt any practice consistently across all its parts. Rather, power and governance are negotiated engagement by engagement, agreement by agreement, within the state, within society, and between society and the state. So, while this book outlines the challenges of applying agonistic principles to the state’s governance practices, I consider the practices of one part of the state, the local city level of the state, in Johannesburg. Ultimately, I try to draw these threads together for the benefit of the wider state.

To identify possible practices of agonism, we have to first establish where strife exists and how the state responds to it. State–society strife has many forms, taking place on city streets, in the courts and in the media. It also takes place in the boardrooms and corridors of the city bureaucracy, away from the attention of their more noisy and visible counterparts. Grievances might be specific to each context, but each city’s protestors share a common desire with protestors worldwide in either calling for a more responsive state or, more radically, in questioning the underlying assumptions of the democratic state. The post-2008 global financial crisis scholarship is still emerging, and many events are too recent for adequate perspective. There is clearly a greater need for study of the complex relationship between protests, state response and the resultant changes (della Porta 2013; Jenkins and Klandermans 1995; Laws and Forester 2015). This relationship varies and is often extremely complex, requiring a fine-grained, contextually nuanced narrative to fully appreciate it. Johannesburg’s democratic transformation is such a story. Despite South Africa’s remarkably peaceful transition to democratic rule (Southall 2001), the phenomenon of street protests about tangible and intangible aspects of the state’s service delivery has proliferated since the city’s first democratic local elections in 1995. This is partly positive because it highlights a fundamental democratic freedom: the right to use streets for public protest. The local-level state, however, responded in many ways to these and other protests, including agonistically and antagonistically, sometimes even simultaneously, highlighting the constraints to, and complexities of, agonistic governance practices. Despite this, agonism presents possibilities for practical application in cases of state–citizen conflict management.

This book is the first to marry the narrative of protest with the response of the state, and to test for instances of agonism in practice. It provides a new perspective on highly visible street protests and other less recognised forms of strife, contr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Authors
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Strife and the State
• 2 Agonism in Public Practice
• 3 Johannesburg’s Conflict and Governance Timeline
• 4 Water wars of Orange Farm
• 5 Informal Trading Struggle in the Inner City
• 6 Billing Backlash by Middle-Class Suburbia
• 7 Agonism’s Possibilities
• References
• Index