Chryssostalis, J.H. and Barnard-Naudé, J 2022. Apartheid remains. Nomos, law and spatiality in post-apartheid South Africa. in: Chryssostalis, J.H. and Barnard-Naudé, J (ed.) Spatial Justice After Apartheid: Nomos in the Postcolony Abingdon, Oxon Routledge. pp. 1-38
| Chapter title | Apartheid remains. Nomos, law and spatiality in post-apartheid South Africa |
|---|---|
| Authors | Chryssostalis, J.H. and Barnard-Naudé, J |
| Editors | Chryssostalis, J.H. and Barnard-Naudé, J |
| Abstract | Through law, apartheid's juridical apparatus created highly regulated concrete spaces of racial segregation, exploitation, dispossession, exclusion, displacement, forced relocation and migration, as well as constant surveillance. The failure to examine the legal character of the apartheid spatial order (and concomitantly of the post-apartheid spatial order) has resulted in the failure to take as the point of departure for the "large-scale social change" envisioned for South Africa both the way in which and the extent to which apartheid's regime was literally "built" by law. The wager of both liberal and transformative constitutionalism has been that replacing the master-norm of apartheid would not only transform the subordinated norms but would also quickly transform the facts on the ground through a distinct "politics of law", broadly aligned with transformation, ubuntu, non racialism and reconciliation. Yet neither liberal nor transformative constitutionalism connected its legal sensibilities sufficiently with the extent to which apartheid nomos formed and normed the ordinary, everyday life of the polity. Thus, although many of "the policies of spatial regimentation" have collapsed in post-apartheid South Africa, the everyday spaces that people inhabit continue to be dominated by a spatial common sense that has normalised, if not naturalised, the everyday experience of spatial injustice, of apartheid's "racial nomos". For apartheid in our view was not simply an oppressive regime, like other oppressive regimes around the world, that happened to be racist, but at its very core a juridicised system of racialised, and racist, spatial ordering, which took the primary form of segregation, implemented and entrenched through a plethora of legal enactments and planning and housing policies and meticulously administered through its various enforcement mechanisms. |
| Keywords | South Africa |
| apartheid | |
| racial nomos | |
| post-apartheid | |
| spatial injustice | |
| spatial order | |
| nomos | |
| colonial nomos | |
| Book title | Spatial Justice After Apartheid: Nomos in the Postcolony |
| Page range | 1-38 |
| Year | 2022 |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 25 Aug 2022 |
| Place of publication | Abingdon, Oxon |
| Series | Law and the Postcolonial |
| ISBN | 9781138559370 |
| 9780203712771 | |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203712771-1 |