ABSTRACT
This chapter situates the book in relation to the literature on critical security studies, private security studies and Criminology. It explains the analytical approach followed, premised on an infrastructural imaginary and a post-structural (Laclauian) reading of hegemony. The chapter elaborates the epistemology that stems from this analytical framework. The concept reiteration as a process that fits between continuation and rupture is emphasised as an important tool for understanding South Africa, its social order and spatial dynamics, both in a descriptive and overtly normative sense. In order to make certain aspects of space more explicit, selected insights from the work of Henri Lefebvre are incorporated into the discussion, in particular the dialectic between official representations of space and more narrowly focussed and exclusive spaces of representation. The chapter then describes the research site, which is Potchefstroom, part of a small city in South Africa, still characterised by much segregation. Some statistics are offered to contextualise South African crime rates globally and to contextualise crime within the study area, in relation to other South African contexts. The chapter elaborates on the most common types of crime in the study area. It concludes by outlining the three-part structure of the book.
