In the past decade, South Africa's "miracle transition" has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity. Less visibly, the post-apartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy’s Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape.
Von Schnitzler explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto―one of many efforts to curb the nonpayment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle―and she traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. She follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and she shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa’s transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world.
Democracy’s Infrastructure examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa’s political transformation.

Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid (Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology, 9)

Business & Money

von Schnitzler, Antina

Economics

Princeton University Press

Democracy's Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid (Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology)

Review\n“This landmark study confronts a key barrier to ‘global knowledge’ and scholarship, particularly in this age of ‘decolonizing’ knowledge. This outstanding collection is the response of how to overcome such obstacles, a model others would do well to follow. Slobodian and Plehwe have gathered a group of excellent scholars expert in the histories of economic ideas and philosophies of a wide variety of societies in global East and South―including China, India, Iceland, Montenegro, Brazil, Guatemala, Russia―to consider the global and local knowledge networks that helped make neoliberalism a dominant global ideology for ‘market civilizations’. The story of a smooth process of knowledge movement from Western ‘core’ to eastern and southern ‘peripheries’ is not only challenged via local histories and ideas, it is complexified to form a more accurate assessment of how ideas become the bases of profound transformations. The book successfully establishes that there are simultaneous, separate, and interconnected, local and global conversations, layers upon layers of thinking, understanding, and practice, independent, semiautonomous, and dependent in a bewildering complexity. A study of ‘global knowledge’ at its best, and a model for emulation. A brilliant must-read collection.”―Inderjeet Parmar, University of London\n“Over 150 years ago Francis Galton made a bet that diffusion of practices from a common point to other sites is far more likely to succeed than multiple sites spontaneously finding similar solutions to common problems. The student of neoliberalism is a subconscious Galtonian, viewing neoliberal thought as a western core diffusing to a global periphery that ‘sucks it up’ with various national edits to the script. Not so, say Plehwe and Slobodian. To truly understand neoliberalism’s global reach we have to break with Galton and appreciate how indigenous varieties emerge and thrive autochthonously. Doing so explains its persistence since ‘it’ is never one thing.”―Mark Blyth, Brown University\n“Market Civilizations shines a bright light on how neoliberalism has ‘traveled’ beyond the neoliberal heartlands. In a series of illuminating essays, a stellar group of contributors provide highly detailed, nicely nuanced analyses of how neoliberalism ‘went local’ in unexpected ways in unusual places. And in so doing, they offer groundbreaking insights into the ins-and-outs as well as the ups-and-downs of neoliberal ideas, adaptations, and applications in a wide range of lesser-known cases around the world.”―Vivien A. Schmidt, Boston University\n“Market Civilizations leaves us with an intellectually vibrant understanding of neoliberalism as a diffuse and diverse school of thought, with various proponents across the world harboring numerous reasons for complementing an evolving liberal international order and their own distinct means and understandings on what it means to nurture ‘market civilizations,’ or rather, what it means to shape societies by the ‘logic of capital.’”―Maribel Morey, Miami Institute for the Social Sciences\n"Critics of neoliberalism have long treated it as a homogeneous and homogenizing force, radially spreading out from the capitalist metropoles of the Global North and spearheaded by Western intellectuals and institutions. Slobodian and Plehwe have assembled a kaleidoscope of studies which explode this view, revealing the plural origins and forms of neoliberal thought and practice. Ranging from efforts to neutralize Black resistance in apartheid South Africa to 'ultraliberal' online movements in contemporary Brazil, from Turkey's experiments in Islamic neoliberalism to their Hindu nationalist counterparts in India, Market Civilizations is an indispensable ideological map at a time when the mutations and fragmentations of neoliberalism are too often mistaken for its demise."―Alberto Toscano, Goldsmiths, University of London\nA deep investigation of neoliberalism's proselytizers in Eastern Eur

Market Civilizations: Neoliberals East and South (Near Future Series)

Slobodian, Quinn

Rupprecht, Tobias

Hofmann, Reto

Balasubramanian, Aditya

Weber, Isabella M.

Walker, Jeremy

Klausen, Jimmy Casas

Fischer, Karin

Plehwe, Dieter

Nartok, Esra Elif

Chamon, Paulo

Jonjic, Mila

Pantelic, Nenad

Mjøset, Lars

Zone Books

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