As apartheid becomes a popular framework for analyzing Palestine/Israel today, a look at the limits of liberation in “post-apartheid” South Africa challenges us rethink the definition of what apartheid is and when it ends. Against the dominant definition of apartheid, the radical wing of the South African liberation movement offered an alternative understanding of apartheid as a system of racial capitalism. Rethinking apartheid with this lens helps us understand extreme inequality, racialized poverty, and militarized policing in South Africa, Palestine/Israel, and the United States today. Because neoliberal apartheid regimes are highly unstable social formations, policing becomes ever more essential to the maintenance of social order. Professor Clarno analyzes the policing in Johannesburg, Jerusalem, and Chicago by tracing the circulation of knowledge and technology through networks of private and state security forces that coordinate to protect the powerful by policing the racialized poor.

Andy Clarno is associate professor of Sociology and Black Studies and coordinator of the Policing in Chicago Research Group at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa after 1994 (University of Chicago Press 2017).