Andries Du Toit

Affiliate Researcher

Andries du Toit is Professor at the School of Government (SOG) at the University of the Western Cape, where he served for thirteen years as the director of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS). He completed his PhD at the University of Essex, studying in the Centre for Ideology and Discourse Analysis under the supervision of Ernesto Laclau. He has published extensively on the political dynamics of power relations on South Africa’s farmed and rural landscapes and their implications for social justice and democracy. His research specialties include the dynamics of change and the restructuring of agro-food value chains in South Africa’s horticultural farming sector, the politics of persistent poverty and structural inequality at the margins of the formal economy, and the political and social consequences of landlessness. His current research considers post-colonial statecraft in the context of South African inequality, focusing on the connections between post-apartheid biopolitics and the constitution of political community. He also has published writings considering the affective dimensions of belonging and repair in the context of South Africa’s legacy of racial and colonial violence.

Publications

• Du Toit, Andries. (2024). A Blow to the Head – a History of Violence. Cape Town: Handmade Books
• Du Toit, Andries. (2023). ‘The Mountain in the Sea: Place, Wilderness and History on the Sunset Side of Hoerikwaggo’. Multilingual Margins: A journal of multilingualism from the periphery 10(1).
• Du Toit, Andries. (2019). ‘The Vampire Squid: Value, Crisis and the Power of Finance’. Development and Change 50(4):1109–20.
• Du Toit, Andries. (2019). ‘Agriculture, Value Chains and the Rural Non-Farm Economy in Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe’. Pp. 185–201 in Value Chains in Sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges of Integration into the Global Economy, Advances in African Economic, Social and Political Development, edited by S. Scholvin, A. Black, J. R. Diez, and I. Turok. Springer International Publishing.
• Du Toit, Andries. (2018). ‘Without the Blanket of the Land: Agrarian Change and Biopolitics in Post–Apartheid South Africa’. The Journal of Peasant Studies 45(5–6):1086–1107.
• Du Toit, Andries. (2017). ‘Post-Agrarian Biopolitics’. Development and Change 48 (6)