ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a historical context for crime and the response to crime in contemporary South Africa. It also offers a conceptual grounding for our understanding of crime. To fulfil these two functions, the chapter firstly ventures upon the metaphor of the frontier and its place in history. The chapter then theorises a contemporary reopened frontier that emerged at least since the 1970s, alongside the unravelling of apartheid. The contemporary frontier is subjected to two techniques of power that render grave asymmetries and as such fuel the root causes of much crime. The political economic technique of closing the frontier through biopolitical abandonment serves the imperative of maximum accumulation by the few. It is, however, self-contradictory, for its adverse consequences. Closure through abandonment is, consequently, augmented with the spatial technique of frontier governance, which involves border-making. Security infrastructures are a significant part of the latter technique. Crime in South Africa, for the most part, is explained by way of Strain Theory, in a context where multidimensional poverty, inequality and senses of injustice. As such, the combination of closure through abandonment and frontier governance remains unsustainable.
