Land restitution and the moral modernity of the new South African state
This project investigates the ongoing South African land restitution process, in which the new state compensates victims of former land dispossessions that were based on laws discriminating “race”. This restitution process has recently been the focus of a critical literature, exploring the phenomenon in its interconnected political, legal, economic and moral dimensions. Building on this research, the project addresses a central research gap by focusing on the renegotiations of modern statehood that are at the core of South African land restitution, given that the new state simultaneously functions as the main driving force, the judicial arbiter and the core reference point (as claims are lodged against the state). The research operates from within a framework of “multiple modernities” (Eisenstadt). It thereby acknowledges that the negotiations about the appropriate ways of righting land-related wrongs of the past in order to make for desirable futures through state-orchestrated human agency take place under conditions, as the involved actors notice themselves, of existential contingency. Given that restitution’s explicit mandate is to unmake the historical injustices of the old state, this process is also crucially concerned with fusing the highly perfected “formal rationality” of the former apartheid state with a different and broadly acceptable “substantive rationality” (Max Weber) into a new, if contested, “morally modern” polity. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, in the course of which four concrete land claim cases as well as their entanglements with the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights & the Land Claims Court were investigated, this project thus studies the land restitution process as an exemplary site, at which the moral modernity of the new South African state is contested, renegotiated and made. In addressing, within the South African context, the crucial issues of political and legal pluralism amidst cultural diversity and difference, the global trend towards juridification and constitutionalism, and the changing role of the modern state in increasingly transnationalised contexts, the project contributes to crucial debates on state-driven land redistribution in the 21st century under conditions of ever widening social inequalities in South Africa and beyond.
Laufzeit
2010 -
Finanzierung
Drei Forschungsgrants der Universität Bern Forschungsstiftung
Ambizione Research Fellowship des Schweizerischen Nationalfonds (SNF)
Fellowship am Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), Stellenbosch, Südafrika.