Conflicting Logics of Exceptionality: New Beginnings and the Problem of Police Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa

type="main"> This article explores the uneasy co-existence between two different pressing needs in post-apartheid South Africa: the urgency to reform the South African Police and the urgency to address the crime wave. Both imply a logic of exceptionality in that both are perceived to require extraordinary measures in exceptional times. On an abstract and ideal level, each of these logics of exceptionality envisages a new beginning, namely a democratic, prosperous and safe South Africa. On the level of everyday practices, however, they oppose each other radically. Indeed, they seem to conflict to the extent that the fulfilment of one is premised on the disavowal of the other. Through an exploration of how transitional justice through institutional reform fared in relation to the imperative to deal with crime, the police emerge as a central player — as the problem in relation to the first logic of exceptionality and the solution in addressing the second. The notions of conflicting logics of exceptionality and diverging new beginnings offer a useful framework for analysing and understanding the complexities at play. Empirically, the article explores police reform from 1994 until the present through ethnographic material in rural and urban South Africa as well as a media archive of police violence.