Repurposing Fear in Contemporary South African Culture – a Critical Criminological Perspective

Conflict criminologists argue that criminal justice systems in contemporary capitalist, consumer societies exemplify a “Pyrrhic defeat”. According to Reiman and Leighton’s Pyrrhic defeat theory, the “defeat” in the fight against crime is designed to fail, since it serves the important objective of spotlighting the conventional crimes of the poor, while obfuscating the possibly even more monstrous crimes of the wealthy and powerful. In this article, I subject the concept of “culture” to scrutiny within a critical criminological theoretical framework. I also demonstrate how fear has been repurposed as a potent element of contemporary South African culture to achieve this objective. This was facilitated by perpetuating rape, disaster capitalism (notably committed during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic) and xenophobic hate crimes. By keeping this “fear factory” operational, I argue that the South African government has been able to perpetrate state crimes largely surreptitiously by repurposing this curious element (fear) of South African culture.