Neoliberal Apartheid
Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994
by Andy Clarno
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Cloth: 978-0-226-42992-2 | Paper: 978-0-226-43009-6 | Electronic: 978-0-226-43012-6
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226430126.001.0001
ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In recent years, as peace between Israelis and Palestinians has remained cruelly elusive, scholars and activists have increasingly turned to South African history and politics to make sense of the situation. In the early 1990s, both South Africa and Israel began negotiating with their colonized populations. South Africans saw results: the state was democratized and black South Africans gained formal legal equality. Palestinians, on the other hand, won neither freedom nor equality, and today Israel remains a settler-colonial state. Despite these different outcomes, the transitions of the last twenty years have produced surprisingly similar socioeconomic changes in both regions: growing inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing the racialized poor. Neoliberal Apartheid explores this paradox through an analysis of (de)colonization and neoliberal racial capitalism.
After a decade of research in the Johannesburg and Jerusalem regions, Andy Clarno presents here a detailed ethnographic study of the precariousness of the poor in Alexandra township, the dynamics of colonization and enclosure in Bethlehem, the growth of fortress suburbs and private security in Johannesburg, and the regime of security coordination between the Israeli military and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The first comparative study of the changes in these two areas since the early 1990s, the book addresses the limitations of liberation in South Africa, highlights the impact of neoliberal restructuring in Palestine, and argues that a new form of neoliberal apartheid has emerged in both contexts.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Andy Clarno is assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
REVIEWS
“Through careful comparative analysis, Clarno undermines the popular misconception that Israel/Palestine and South Africa took divergent paths in the 1990s, with the latter becoming a model of post-racial freedom and equality. Instead, as he persuasively explains, the experiences and standards of living of poor Palestinians and poor Blacks in South Africa are similarly precarious and vulnerable to violence and marginalization. The theoretically rich ways in which Clarno explains apartheid in terms of neoliberal political economy will give the concept a far broader cache among scholars and activists than it currently has.”
— Lisa Hajjar, author of Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights
“Neoliberal Apartheid is an exciting, highly innovative, thought-provoking, and powerfully argued analysis of socioeconomic inequality and the governance of social exclusion. Clarno’s study is grounded in an impressive ethnographic fieldwork, which has taken him from South African townships to Palestinian refugee camps, where he talked to a wide array of informants, from local residents to policymakers, political activists, business representatives, and local and international security personnel. The width and depth of Clarno’s research, combined with wide-ranging first-hand accounts of realities otherwise difficult for researchers to access, make the book a path-breaking contribution to the study of social change, political transitions, and security dynamics in highly unequal societies.”
— Franco Barchiesi, author of Precarious Liberation
“Clarno charts the rise of private security, ‘racial capitalism,’ and separation in both places over the last 25 years. Instead of claiming that Israel practices apartheid—and thus focusing on the similarities between South Africa of the 1980s and Israel today (itself a worthy debate)—Clarno demonstrates how South Africa shifted from constitutional apartheid to economic apartheid in the 1990s. Call it what you will, but the ground is fertile in Israel and Palestine for a similar shift in the future.”
— Tablet Magazine
“It is against that rich trove of reflection, penned by revolutionaries fighting for their lives, that Andy Clarno deliberately situates his important study of the post-Oslo/post-Apartheid systems in Palestine and South Africa, Neoliberal Apartheid. Clarno wishes to bridge political economy and modern settler-colonial studies. . . . Clarno’s ethnography beautifully and clarifyingly complicates a tendency in modern settler-colonial studies to sideline capitalism and imperialism.”
— Jadaliyya
“Clarno presents a different perspective on settler colonialism and how this plays into the inequalities experienced by Palestine and South Africa at different ends of the political spectrum. . . . The often mentioned understanding of the Palestinian plight from the South African perspective is given a different dimension in this book. It is not merely a question of emulating a previous process, but of understanding limitations. For Palestinians, it means awareness of how settler-colonialism and capitalism need to be taken into consideration jointly. Clarno’s proposal is to redefine apartheid as something that ‘emphasizes the articulation between racism and capitalism.’”
— Middle East Monitor
Won
— 2018 Paul Sweezy Marxist Sociology Book Award
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Racial Capitalism and Settler Colonialism - Andy Clarno
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226430126.003.0001
[settler colonialism;racial capitalism;Palestine;South Africa;marginalization;securitization;methods;neoliberalization;decolonization;Israel]
This chapter begins with an introduction to the paradox that the book examines: despite divergent trajectories of political change, South Africa and Palestine/Israel have experienced surprisingly similar social and economic changes over the last twenty years. What explains the simultaneous development of extreme inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced security strategies? Next, the chapter offers a brief overview of comparative scholarship on South Africa and Palestine/Israel and describes the key interventions of this study. The core of the chapter is a discussion of two fields of critical interdisciplinary scholarship: settler colonialism and racial capitalism. The book analyzes the relationship between the neoliberalization of racial capitalism and the (de)colonization of settler colonial regimes in South Africa and Palestine/Israel over the last twenty years. It argues that these processes have combined to generate new forms of neoliberal apartheid defined by marginalization and securitization. The chapter ends by presenting the research methods and an outline of the chapters. (pages 1 - 23)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1 / South Africa and Palestine/Israel: Histories and Transitions - Andy Clarno
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226430126.003.0002
[racial capitalism;settler colonialism;South Africa;Palestine;crisis;transition;neoliberalization;decolonization;Johannesburg;Jerusalem;Israel]
This chapter traces the histories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in South Africa and Palestine/Israel. Despite historical differences, South Africa and Israel governed similar social formations during the second half of the 20th century. The chapter then presents an overview of the political and economic transformations that have restructured social relations in South Africa and Palestine/Israel over the last twenty years. In the early 1990s, both states responded to political-economic crises by neoliberalizing their racial capitalist economies and entering into negotiations over decolonization. While South Africa has been partially decolonized, Israel remains a settler colonial state. In both cases, however, the combination of neoliberalization and (de)colonization has produced extreme inequality, racialized poverty, and advanced strategies of securitization. The chapter ends by introducing the sites of my ethnographic research: the Johannesburg and Jerusalem metropolitan regions. The difference between Israel’s ongoing colonial project and the post-colonial project of the South African state are perhaps nowhere more evident than in these urban regions. Yet the landscapes of Johannesburg and Jerusalem are increasingly defined by the combination of marginalization and securitization. (pages 24 - 53)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2 / Alexandra: The Precariousness of the Poor - Andy Clarno
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226430126.003.0003
[precariousness;concentrated poverty;neoliberalism;informal settlements;fragmentation;urban renewal;private property;social movements;class;Johannesburg]
This chapter explores the precariousness of life in a Black township in Johannesburg after apartheid. The chapter begins with a brief social history of Alexandra township before analyzing the transformation of Alexandra into a ghetto of exclusion for the increasingly expendable Black working class. As factories closed and the Black middle class moved out, Alexandra became a site of concentrated poverty, abandoned factories, and informal settlements. Confronting a dual crisis of housing and unemployment, the urban poor increasingly survive through informal economic and housing strategies. These strategies, however, have intensified the fragmentation of the community. The chapter then turns to the Alexandra Renewal Project (ARP), a major “urban renewal” project of the post-apartheid state. Analyzing the successes and failures of the ARP highlights the limits of decolonization in a context of commitments to private property and the ongoing devaluation of Black life. The chapter ends by discussing efforts to overcome fragmentation and social movements in Alexandra today. (pages 54 - 88)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3 / Bethlehem: Neoliberal Colonization - Andy Clarno
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226430126.003.0004
[colonization;neoliberalization;enclosure;fragmentation;concentrated inequality;villages;settlements;neoliberal colonization;resistance;Jerusalem]
This chapter explores the articulation of colonization and neoliberalization in the West Bank with a focus on the Bethlehem region. After a brief social history of Bethlehem, the chapter traces the territorial fragmentation of the Bethlehem region into a series of isolated Palestinian enclosures after Oslo. These neoliberal enclosures attempt to contain a colonized population that has become increasingly disposable due to neoliberal restructuring. As sites of concentrated inequality and intense marginalization, however, they offer only a precarious form of containment. The chapter then turns to the Palestinian villages, which have become the front lines of struggles over colonization in the West Bank today. In the hills west of Bethlehem, Palestinian villagers confront colonial violence by Israeli settlers and the state along with a crisis of unemployment and rapid urbanization. These dynamics have combined to create an indirect form of displacement and a market-based strategy of colonization. Overall, the chapter argues that Palestinians in the West Bank today confront a unique form of neoliberal colonization. The chapter ends with a discussion of Palestinian resistance to colonialism and neoliberalism. (pages 89 - 124)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4 / A Legalized Mafia: Security Privatization in Johannesburg - Andy Clarno
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226430126.003.0005
[fortification;securitization;privatization;private security;policing;residents' associations;racial profiling;labor;Johannesburg;South Africa]
In northern Johannesburg, the historically white neighborhoods around Sandton – just across the highway from Alexandra – have become laboratories for the development of advanced strategies for securing the powerful and policing poor Black South Africans. This chapter begins with a discussion of crime and insecurity in South Africa and an overview of policing in post-apartheid South Africa. It then traces the fortification of elite neighborhoods through the construction of walled enclosures and the expansion of private security. Residents’ associations and private security companies work together to develop cutting edge security regimes for wealthy neighborhoods. The most sophisticated new strategies of preventative security rely on racial profiling to target young Black men. Yet networked strategies to produce security for the elite generate new tensions and rely on the labor of the same people that they target: poor Black men. This highlights the contradictions of securitization as well as the continuing value of surplus populations – both as a source of low-wage labor and as a symbolic threat fueling the expansion of private security industries and fortress suburbs. (pages 125 - 157)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5 / A Monopoly of Violence? Security Coordination in the West Bank - Andy Clarno
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226430126.003.0006
[security coordination;training;network;police;military;labor;West Bank;Palestinian Authority;Israel;United States]
The most important new actor in Israel’s security apparatus is the Palestinian Authority (PA), whose security forces are trained by the United States and the European Union and deployed to suppress resistance inside the West Bank enclaves. This chapter begins by discussing the dynamics of Israeli (in)security and situating the West Bank within the broader array of forces and strategies deployed to police the Palestinian people. The chapter then traces the genealogy of security coordination between the Israel military and the PA security forces under Oslo. It then analyzes the strategies and tactics of security coordination. Although justified by a discourse of “Palestinian/Arab/Muslim terrorism,” the coordinated security forces target all Palestinian opponents of Oslo. Finally, the chapter analyzes the dynamics of contestation and cooperation within the security network, with attention to the reliance on the low-wage labor of Palestinian security officers. Security coordination in the West Bank is one of the world’s most sophisticated efforts to manage an unruly population. But tensions and contradictions undermine the illusion of stability. (pages 158 - 193)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion: Neoliberal Apartheid - Andy Clarno
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226430126.003.0007
[apartheid;decolonization;neoliberal apartheid;racial domination;racial capitalism;South Africa;Palestine;marginalization;securitization;crisis;Israel]
This chapter draws out the overall implications of the book. It begins with a discussion of apartheid and (de)colonization in Palestine/Israel and South Africa. While acknowledging the importance of the international legal definition of apartheid for efforts to hold the State of Israel accountable, the South African transition calls into question the value of legal instruments that focus exclusively on the state. Rather than defining apartheid as a political form of racial domination, the chapter proposes a political-economic definition that brings together an analysis of racial domination and racial capitalism. Building on this framework, the chapter argues that the transitions of the last twenty years have generated neoliberal apartheid regimes in both South Africa and Palestine/Israel. The chapter then outlines the core features of neoliberal apartheid: extreme inequality, racialized marginalization, advanced securitization, and constant crisis. It ends by suggesting that these features are present not only in South Africa and Palestine/Israel but throughout much of the world today. (pages 194 - 206)
This chapter is available at:
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