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On Violent Democracy

Violence and democracy are generally treated as antithetical. However, this article argues for the concept of violent democracy using the South African case to explore the ways in which violence and democracy may be mutually constitutive in countries of the global South, with their particular histories of violence, power, inequality and contestation. The article draws on research into intra-elite conflict and violence, as well as subaltern collective violence, to demonstrate the ways in which democratic institutions generate and shape violent practices, while violence in turn limits the access and rights promised by democracy. The article explores violence and elections, violence within organizations, political assassination, and the subversion of the state institutions of the rule of law to show how democratic institutions generate and shape violence, and violence in turn restricts and undermines the workings of democracy – which at the same time provides mechanisms for constraining and challenging violence. It argues that this kind of violent democracy emerges within a glaringly unequal socio-economic order, and that violence provides alternative sources of power through which this order may be preserved or contested. The analysis of violent democracy may reinvigorate our understanding of democracy not only in the global South, but also in the countries of the global North.