Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Tale Of Two Townships: Political Opportunity And Violent And Non-Violent Local Control In South Africa, Alex Park

Award Winning Sociology Papers

A number of recent gains in social science have found that periods of violent civil disorder marked by chaos may actually exhibit an underlying order and a rationale on part of perpetrators in response to specific political conditions of the time. The conjecture is that violent control emerges as a grassroots effort to establish authority in areas experiencing a vacuum of central authority. Given those conditions, can these same theories of violence be applied to incidents of widespread non-violent control as well, where and when the political conditions are similar? Using a variety of accounts, from research conducted by human …