ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that just as crises need contextualisation in order to make sense of them, so do situations in which political actors counter-construct apparently unambiguous empirical facts of disaster or emergency as non-crises. It describes the 2008 events, the generalised xenophobia in South Africa as well as an analysis of the effects resulting from governmental response to it. The chapter focuses on narratives of the cohesion crisis, a recently reinvigorated debate focused primarily on the need to unite a country riddled by inherited racial inequality and division while obscuring the fluid and multi-faceted nature and causes of intergroup tensions across the country. It focuses on the effects of these various non-crises, and suggests that in their efforts to promote and uphold the legitimacy, sovereignty and relative success of the South African post-Apartheid project, they simultaneously sustain and in the case of xenophobia to a certain degree even necessitate a climate of perpetual anti-outsider violence in the country.
