Cycles of Contention Post-Apartheid: A Challenge to Current Theory

Since 2004 South Africa has been undergoing a wave of protests predominately led by the unemployed within South Africa’s impoverished townships and informal settlements.  This protest wave reached a peak in 2012 where it has been estimated there was an average of three protests a day (IRIS, 2012).  Furthermore, there has been a discernible rise in industrial unrest with an increasing number of wildcat strikes occurring as workers choose to take their demands outside organised trade unions and collective bargaining processes.  The intensity of this movement and the hostility of the State to it was tragically highlighted by the events at Marikana in 2012.  This upsurge in contentious politics falls within a wider global cycle of contention. This paper uses the South African experience in order to challenge Tarrow’s theory of cycles of contention in order to advance social movement theory from a Southern perspective. It will be argued that Tarrow’s framework, and social movement theory more generally, pays insufficient attention to the specificities of capitalist development.  This paper seeks to expand social movement theory and the analysis of popular protest through an examination of the specificities of capitalist neoliberal development and how this has shaped the working classes post-apartheid. The paper will demonstrate how a greater emphasis on the role of capitalism within social movement theory has much to contribute not only to the understanding of protest and social movements in South Africa but also for the analysis of the global cycles of contention.