Police subjectivities in South Africa: a discourse analysis of police officers’ talk on protest

Cornell, Josephine and Malherbe, Nick and Suffla, Shahnaaz and Seedat, Mohamed (2025) Police subjectivities in South Africa: a discourse analysis of police officers’ talk on protest. Subjectivity. ISSN 1755-6341

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Abstract

Police officers in the South African Police Service (SAPS) undertake their police work within national, institutional, and personal discourses. Together, these discourses create different, often contradictory, police subjectivities. Resultantly, research on policing in South Africa is increasingly concerned with these subjectivities and the contexts in which they are constructed. However, despite this growing interest in discourse and subjectivities, scholars of policing have not typically employed a discourse analysis to examine these processes. Through a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, we examine two discourses, violence as an internal malignancy of protest and protest as legitimate . The subjectivities enabled through these discourses both sympathised with and demonised the struggles of protesters, reflecting a broader contradiction in South African society, namely that protest is discursively reified in the Constitution but must be exercised within the discursive-material parameters set by the state.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number:	10.1057/s41286-025-00209-1
Dates:	Date Event 4 February 2025 Accepted 27 February 2025 Published Online
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Policing, South Africa, South African Police Service (SAPS), Subjectivity, Discourse, Protests, Violence
Subjects:	CAH04 - psychology > CAH04-01 - psychology > CAH04-01-01 - psychology (non-specific)
Divisions:	Faculty of Business, Law and Social Sciences > College of Psychology
Depositing User:	Gemma Tonks
Date Deposited:	10 Mar 2025 11:53
Last Modified:	10 Mar 2025 11:53
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/16219

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