What’s in a name and why it matters: A historical analysis of the relationship between state authority, vigilantism and penal power in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article aims to clarify the relationship between state authority, vigilantism and penal power. I ask how shifting political contexts shape the construction of the ‘vigilante’ and the legitimation (or not) of vigilante violence. Based on a historical analysis of how the terms ‘vigilante’, ‘vigilantism’ and ‘mob justice’ are used in mainstream discourse in South Africa the article tracks the political transformations that took place in the South African state in the late 1970s, the mid-1980s and post-1994. I use the term ‘precarious penality’ to describe penality on the periphery—both geographically, in marginalized poor black townships—and symbolically, to denote spaces where the boundaries between what is ‘state’ and what is not are blurred. Spaces of ‘precarious penality’ pose specific problems for the liberal principles of due process and human rights that are enshrined in the South African Constitution but often distorted in practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".