Animated by the provocative question of why vigilantism endures in a vibrant new democracy, Nicholas Rush Smith’s book Contradictions of Democracy offers a puzzling answer: the persistence of extralegal violence is a result of citizens contesting the effective implementation of democratic rights regimes. In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, Smith argues that it is the very success of the state in implementing a legal regime with policing, rights guarantees for the accused, and procedural justice that produces vigilantism, because the very things that protect citizens from state overreach in the prosecution of crime also protect criminals at the expense of the community. By protecting accused criminals—through bail proceedings, delays in trials, acquittals, restricted policing procedures, and the like—the state is, in this logic, failing to make their law-abiding citizens’ lives meaningfully more secure by removing criminals from their communities.

Drawing on more than 20 months of immersive fieldwork in South Africa, and a dizzying array of ethnographic data sources, Smith primarily confronts the existing literature on vigilantism by posing a comparison of two communities: KwaMashu, the “murder capital” of South Africa (p. 8), and Sebokeng, a community with falling crime rates (p. 9). The persistence of vigilantism in both communities, Smith argues, undermines the common explanations for that phenomenon; namely, that it is a response to high-crime environments and state failure to police or prosecute crime. Instead, Smith posits that densely connected communities within the context of broader insecurities and the formation of democratic states produce an environment ripe for vigilante activity.

In addition to this comparison of fieldwork sources, Smith also has two chapters focusing on historical case studies. Chapter 2 uses archival sources to look at the antecedents of vigilantism in KwaMashu during the transition to democracy, which was a period marked by high levels of violence between more or less politically aligned opposing factions. Chapter 3 focuses on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the hearings conducted in Sebokeng, particularly on how the commission defined culpability for violence and the notion of justice, which differed from the community’s understandings. By tying these two historical and archival chapters to the fieldwork sites that feature in later chapters, Smith ensures that they build his central argument. Smith also includes a case study of crime in a white, affluent suburban community in chapter 7 that examines the flourishing private security industry in South Africa as a kind of outsourced vigilantism.

Throughout, the book relies on Smith’s multi-visit ethnographic fieldwork, including local mapping exercises, participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and field notes. Although it can, at times, be difficult to sort out the materials that come from secondary, archival, and ethnographic sources in his use of evidence, the richness of the data and its intertwined use enable Smith to weave a compelling narrative about vigilantism and its persistence in the democratic era in South Africa.

The book is sure to spark debates with its counterintuitive argument—that it is environments of state strength, rather than of state weakness, that compel “vigilante citizens” to engage in extralegal violence to address crime. A more in-depth reading of Smith’s argument and of his capacious definition of vigilantism—including not merely mob violence against accused criminals, but also semi-official citizen policing organizations and private security—clarifies the ways in which this seeming contradiction plays out. The fear of crime, whether borne out in aggregate statistics or not, combined with an environment of material insecurity and inequality, produces a fear of criminality and demands for state protections against it. Rather than focusing on the fear of state overreach, then, citizens focus on their demands for security that are not being met in procedural protections of the accused.

In his most compelling and perhaps most cross-contextually applicable argument, Smith turns Charles Tilly’s claim that the state is a protection racket on its head, by arguing instead that demands for security from citizens lead the state to engage in a kind of vigilantism. To be seen as protecting citizens, the state aggressively polices and inflicts violence on assumed criminal demographics: in the South African case (as in others), this means young black men. In interviews with interlocutors in this demographic category in both communities studied, Smith uncovers the ways in which the demands for protection and the impulses by the state to implement “efficient policing” lead to the violation of rights of young black men in the name of democratic order. When these targeted demographics then demand protections in the name of rights, the case is dismissed by the same logic that led their rights to be violated in the first instance.

Where Smith is perhaps less convincing is in his work on the TRC and transitional justice within the overall framework of criminal justice and state strength. Smith writes at length about the procedural sense of law throughout the book and includes the transitional justice period within this same language. However, much of the literature on truth commissions, and indeed concerning transitional justice more generally, focuses on the exceptional nature of these mechanisms for state-building (Robert Rotberg and Dennis Thompson, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, 2000). Rather than making sense of the TRC as part of procedural justice—because the crimes against humanity posed by the TRC were not illegal in the domestic sense under apartheid, given that they were often state sanctioned—much of the literature on transitional justice instead looks at the TRC and other transitional justice mechanisms as ritual moral activities aimed at state-building (Richard Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State, 2001). Although they were, in a structural sense, neutral (investigating the wrongdoings of both the apartheid state and the liberation movements), the commissioners of the TRC were in their place by virtue of the success of the democratic transition and were not seen to be neutral by participants or observers (Albie Sachs, “Truth and Reconciliation,” SMU Law Review, 52[4], 1999). As such, they were not adjudicating between parties with the same intent or mandate but were agents of temporally and procedurally limited institutions of exceptional justice.

In the context of the overall contribution of this book, however, this disagreement is small. Smith’s book is fundamentally about how the strength of the state has unintended consequences, and how demands for certain kinds of goods, like security, can trample on other democratic imperatives, like the provision of rights. In investigating these weighty questions, Smith challenges assumptions about the importance of state strength for producing unproblematic democratic norms and practices and thereby admirably examines not only the root causes of vigilantism, but also the myriad contradictions of democracy.