Police Subjectivities in South Africa: A Discourse Analysis of Police Officers’ Talk on Protest

Police officers in the South African Police Service (SAPS) undertake their police work within national, institutional and personal discourses. Together, these discourses create different, often contradictory, police subjectivities. Resultantly, research on policing in South Africa is increasingly concerned with these subjectivities and the contexts in which they are constructed. However, despite this growing interest in discourse and subjectivities, scholars of policing have not typically employed a discourse analysis to examine these processes. Through a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, we examine two discourses, violence as an internal malignancy of protest and protest as legitimate. The subjectivities enabled through these discourses both sympathised with and demonised the struggles of protesters, reflecting a broader contradiction in South African society, namely that protest is discursively reified in the Constitution but must be exercised within the discursive-material parameters set by the state.