Distributing coherence: Human rights, HIV, police violence and the post-Apartheid state

This thesis explores the multiple and sometimes contradictory intersections of power which constitute both the state and the possibilities for life in a working class neighbourhood in Cape Town, South Africa. This ethnography highlights that rather than a simple, reified portrayal of the state, the state acts as both a site of power and is constituted by the multiple and contradictory relationships which give it shape as an actor. In this regard the central questions of this thesis are "what is the state?" and "how does it maintain legitimacy?"
In the past several years this neighbourhood has been perceived as being antagonistic to the state and its plans. This perception is largely the product of an incidence in 2010 when the local population clashed with the police in order to prevent them from evicting residents. However, at the same time this neighbourhood benefits from many of the organs of welfare that have equally defined the post-Apartheid state. Here benevolence is expressed by the state in the form of free healthcare, widely distributed disability grants, and old age pensions. Having come to this neighbourhood through HIV/AIDS research it was this contradiction between a state that "hurts and heals" which drew my interest. In this regard the chapters in this dissertation sample some of the diverse relationships between the state and the residents of this neighbourhood.