Erstes Forschungsprojekt 

Land Restitution and the Moral Modernity of the New South African State

This legal anthropological project investigates the ongoing South African land restitution process, in which the new state compensates victims of former land dispossessions based on laws discriminating “race”. This restitution process has been the focus of a critical literature, exploring the phenomenon in its interconnected political, legal, economic and moral dimensions. Building on this research, the project addresses a central research gap by focusing on the highly juridified renegotiations of modern statehood that are at the core of South African land restitution, given that the new state simultaneously functions as the main driving force, the judicial arbiter and the core reference point (as claims are lodged against the state). Given that restitution’s explicit mandate is to unmake the historical injustices of the old state, this process is thus crucially concerned with fusing the highly perfected “formal rationality” of the former apartheid state with a different and broadly acceptable “substantive rationality” (Max Weber) into a new, if contested, “morally modern” polity. This project thus studies land restitution as an exemplary site, at which the moral modernity of the new South African state is contested, renegotiated and made in and through the law. In light of the rise and fall, in public perception, of transformative constitutionalism in South Africa, the project thereby also engages with the latest round of public debates around “expropriation without compensation” amidst corrupt conditions of state capture.

Zweites Forschungsprojekt

Postliberal Affordances: Liberal Legalism, Normative Pluralism and Populist Critique in South Africa

This project examines contemporary challenges to liberal legalism through the prism of legal and political debates in South Africa. While liberal constitutionalism and the rule of law were long seen as globally ascendant, recent years have witnessed growing scepticism towards the normative authority of liberalism. The project advances two interrelated theses. First, the present moment reflects less an institutional collapse of liberal democracy than an ideological crisis of hegemonic liberalism, whose normative self-evidence has eroded. Second, the resurgence of populist, decolonial and neo-traditional critiques of liberal legalism not only challenges established constitutional frameworks but also opens new perspectives for reassessing their promises, limits and possible futures.

Conceptualising such dynamics as postliberal affordances, the project investigates how liberal legalism is contested, defended and reimagined in South Africa, often seen as a paradigmatic site of transformative constitutionalism. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, interviews with legal practitioners and political actors, and analysis of legislation, jurisprudence and public debates, the project shows how struggles over constitutionalism and normative pluralism illuminate broader transformations of law in what may be an emerging postliberal moment.