ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on Wacquant’s notion of territorial stigmatisation to investigate why some spaces inside and outside of the small city of Potchefstroom in South Africa have become infamous and why this is significant for the spatial politics of crime and security. The areas in question are known to be populated by foreign nationals, drugs gangs and black South Africans. They are also supposedly the sources of crime in the city. The argument is that biopolitical abandonment is not merely about making live and letting die, as per Foucault. It is also about making life by letting die in a particular way. Contra Wacquant’s analysis of northern societies, stigmatisation does not necessarily lead to increased direct policing of stigmatised spaces. By relegating criminality and ‘superfluous’ life to certain zones and allowing it a minimal level of existence, a constitutive outside, following Laclau and Mouffe, is created and strengthened through border-making. Infamous spaces essentially serve as a justification for the inside. Stigmatisation has numerous adverse consequences for ordinary citizens living and working in these spaces. Furthermore, border-making through stigmatisation glosses over deeply entrenched entanglements between the inside and the outside.
