Elite Contestation in South Africa, 2006–2018: The Making and Unmaking of a Power Elite
Ivor Chipkin and Jelena Vidojević have a new peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Southern African Studies: “Elite Contestation in South Africa, 2006–2018: The Making and Unmaking of a Power Elite”.
The article develops a framework for analysing South Africa’s “elite social terrain” and uses protest data to model shifts in elite contestation over time. It argues that the ANC has historically played a central gatekeeping role over positions and resources in the state, shaping how elites compete and consolidate. The authors suggest that, as this gatekeeping function weakens, contestation becomes more polycentric—creating space for new political formations and, in some cases, for competition to move beyond formal politics and into organised criminal networks.
This publication builds on a wider collaborative research programme that includes earlier applied work produced with the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), at a time when NSI operated under its former name, GAPP (Government and Public Policy). That collaboration resulted in the 2022 Southern Africa Report “Dangerous elites: Protest, conflict and the future of South Africa”, which presented the core hypothesis in a policy-oriented format and drew on joint work across institutions and technical partners. The JSAS article is a distinct academic contribution: it formalises and extends the analysis for a scholarly audience through the peer-review process.
