Abstract
Since the advent of democracy in 1994, South Africa has experienced an unprecedented rise in the frequency and intensity of community protests. Most of the available empirical evidence locates the high levels of unemployment, inequality, poverty and discontentment with the quality of democracy at the centre of the exponential growth of community protest action in the country (Alexander, 2010; Hough, 2008; Manyaka, 2018; Mottiar and Bond, 2012; Paret and Runciman, 2016; Twala, 2014). Despite the growing magnitude of community protest activity, there is a paucity of scholarly work that concentrates on analysing how municipalities respond to community protests and the factors that inform municipal responses. I argue that existing scholarship has limited its focus mainly to examining the impacts of the prior application of restrictions on the right to protest from securocratic analytical lenses (Duncan, 2014; 2016; Royeppen, 2016) or on examining the impacts of the immediate responses of the police to community protests (Dixon, 2015; Marks and Bruce, 2015; Mkhize, 2015; and Omar, 2006). However, scholars have paid scant attention to analysing what happens inside municipalities when community protests erupt and how the institutional environment of municipal institutions shape their responses to community protests. It is this gap in the body of literature that this dissertation seeks to address...
M.A. (Anthropology and Development Studies)