Roshan, Tony Samara. Cape Town after Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), $25.00, 256 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8166-7001-7 (paper).

In this volume, Tony Roshan Samara painstakingly demonstrates how White supremacy has continued to evolve in a city that celebrates almost two decades since the official demise of apartheid, having refashioned itself through South Africa’s neoliberal security governance regime. Samara’s close examination of urban neoliberalism as a “political project and, more pointedly, an exercise of power” welcomes a conversation to critique the mechanisms that fortify the city’s security governance (12). Whereas colonial and apartheid eras established violent forms of security that overtly delineated racial boundaries, in today’s neoliberal racial era, where market principles become more entrenched in public discourse, policy and practice, security is “a commodity rather than a public good or right, acquired (or not acquired) according to the same logic with which the market distributes all its products” (17). Security, while purportedly sanctioned to make communities safer, in this case, exacerbates a legacy of racialized state violence.