Book launch: The truth about crime - sovereignty, knowledge, social order

The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research and Wits University Press will host the launch of a book by anthropologists Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff.

In this book, the two make a startling but entirely convincing claim about our times: it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves – it is by our crimes.

With special attention to South Africa’s struggle to build a democracy founded on the rule of law, they sweep outward to survey an astonishing range of forms of crime and policing, from petty thefts to the multibillion-dollar scams of too-big-to-fail financial institutions. Looking at recent transformations in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance that have led to an era where crime and policing are ever more complicit, they offer a powerful meditation on new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political economy of representation – even the production of truth – that have arisen in the late modern world.

The book will be launched in a form of a panel discussion, chaired by Professor Hlonipha Mokoena. Speakers include Professors Achille Mbembe and Keith Breckenridge and the authors will be the respondents.

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