1 Is South Africa reverting to a repressive state? Jane Duncan Inaugural professorial lecture, Council Chambers, University of Johannesburg, 13 July 2016 Introduction Since the Marikana massacre in 2012, several journalists, academics and media commentators have argued that South Africa is reverting to a repressive state. They have interpreted violence at the hands of the South African Police Service (Saps) generally, and Marikana specifically, as signs that the post-apartheid social order can no longer be held in check through consent alone. They argue that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and other powerful actors have concluded that naked violence is now needed to stabilise increasingly fractious social relations (McMichael 2014; Pithouse 2016: 1-5). Some have even used the term ‘police state’ to describe post-Marikana South Africa (Hlongwane 2014; Kasrils 2013; Essop, Eliseev and Grootes 2015; Bezuidenhout 2016). As a police state is one where the police act as a political force to contain social dissent using arbitrary force, it is an important manifestation of a more repressive state: a society that is ruled by its military is another. How likely is South Africa to descend into a state of full-blown repression? How likely is it that there will be more Marikanas? Needless to say, being able to answer these questions will have a major impact on the future trajectory of the country’s politics. In attempting to do so, I will move beyond arguments set out in my previous book ‘The rise of the securocrats: the case of South Africa’ (Duncan 2014). In this book, I assessed the significance of the growth in the strength of the state’s repressive apparatus, but did not really consider limits on the state’s capacity to repress. I do so in this paper, and in doing so, I draw on arguments set out in my new book ‘Protest nation: the right to protest in South Africa’ (Duncan 2016). There can be little argument with the statement that South Africa’s democratic government under its fourth president. Jacob Zuma, has strengthened the coercive capacities of the state, consisting of the police, the intelligence and the military and located in the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security Cluster. In fact, it would appear that this Cluster has become the praetorian guards of an increasingly embattled presidency (Duncan 2014: 2-4). The well- reported growth in the levels of police violence against ordinary civilians and protestors and police militarisation are the most visible manifestation of this shift, as is t he normalisation of the military in domestic policing functions, which suggests a growing militarisation of society (Nicholson 2015). However, the huge public controversies over police violence and police militarisation, mask the fact that there are fundamental shifts in the coercive capacities of the state, away from overt repression and towards less visible, more pre-emptive forms of repression. What are the indicators of this shift and why is it significant? From human intelligence to signals intelligence The first indicator is that intelligence work has become increasingly important to stabilising social relations. Surveillance provides the state with a politically low-cost form of social control, as abuses are very difficult to detect. Political surveillance is part of an arsenal of tools available to the state to profile problem subjects, and to use this knowledge to stymie protests they may consider to be problematic. The state can use such surveillance, or the threat of surveillance, to create fear that organised violence will be used against perceived opponents.