ABSTRACT
A coherent response to the challenges of transitional justice and criminal justice reform will only emerge once divisions between past and present, political and criminal violence, and restorative and retributive responses, are questioned and interventions provide integrated responses to complex, evolving problems. At present the transitional era is characterised by hopelessly mixed messages. The apartheid assassin is granted amnesty, while the car hijacker is portrayed as the new nation’s nemesis. Amnesty measures and prosecutions in relation to apartheid-era abuses appear self-interested or arbitrary. Similarly, the balance between hard-line and more progressive measures addressing present-day crime often seems to lack coherence. Violence in myriad forms is now widely acknowledged to be a characteristic
of transitional societies. Violent crime is endemic in a number of Central American states – writing about Guatemala, for example, Snodgrass Godoy (2005) refers to the ‘razor’s edge’ between crime and human rights, and the transition from the ‘public’ violence of state-sponsored genocide to a massive wave of ‘private’ postwar criminality. Based on a survey of social science studies of internal conflict and civil wars, Thoms and Ron (2007) argue that processes such as democratisation and regime change are themselves dangerous, in essence that regime transition is a major conflict risk factor. ‘Democracy, it seems, is good for peace if you have it, but efforts to achieve democracy, such as elections-promotion, may plunge a country into conflict’ (702). Explanations for such violence include the ruptures in dominant political and economic arrangements caused by ‘conflicts over liberalisation’ (the rapid adoption of democratic norms and liberal economic policies in countries where patrimonialism or clientism reign: Lund 2006: 48-49); related conflicts over the terms of accumulation and the distribution of wealth, the scramble for position before the rules of the game become fixed, leading to a continuum of violence in late capitalist transitions (Cramer 2006); enduring structural violence (poverty, inequality, discrimination); and weak states, whether in terms of modest institutional reach and legitimacy or an inability to secure a monopoly over the means
of violence. Many of these explanations are both globally informed and locally textured. In South Africa the evidence points to significant and often rising levels of
crime in the transitional era, both pre-and post-1994 (ICHRP 2003: 85; Shaw 2002). There were divergent patterns within such broad generalisations: black South Africans were more likely to be victimised than whites; for reported crime over the period from 1994 to 2000, incidents of murder fell, while the number of murder attempts, serious assaults and rapes rose slightly, and all violent interpersonal crime displayed significant seasonal patterns; property crime remained largely stable (Shaw 2002: 42-58). Nevertheless, eye-catching quotes around the turn of the century painted a bleak picture: ‘South Africa is said to have the highest incidence of murder of any country in the world not at war’ (Ellis 1999: 49). Overall, reported crime in the post-apartheid era peaked in 2002-3, with subsequent improvements troubled by ‘spikes’ and some more enduring exceptions affecting particular crimes and locations (e.g. certain forms of aggravated robbery remain problematic, such as residential robberies).1
