Making the Law; Breaking the Law; Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Sovereignty and Territorial Control in Three South African Settlements

Demonstrating that xenophobic violence involves various levels of departure from the state-sanctioned social order, Monson argues that making the law, breaking the law or taking the law into own hands are three sub-national forms of sovereignty and political authority that help understand ‘…xenophobic violence as local-level appropriations of – or incursions into – one or both of the dual components of state sovereignty: legitimacy (or recognition as the lawful source of social predictability) and capacity to regulate (for instance, through its theoretical monopoly on mobility and coercive force).