Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Compared to many other countries, South Africa has quite a liberal refugee settlement policy. But public hostility towards refugees in the country is a serious obstacle to refugee protection. To understand what is driving anti-refugee sentiment amongst the masses, this study investigates refugee settlement policy preferences in the post-apartheid nation. Data from the 2020 round of the nationally representative South African Social Attitudes Survey (N = 3133) was used. Different possible drivers of policy preferences were tested. Data analysis showed that there was a robust relationship between immigrant threat perceptions and policy preferences. This finding is consistent with integrated threat theory, highlighting the damaging effects of widespread negative stereotypes about immigrants in the country. Other notable drivers of attitudes identified include economic anxiety and religiosity. Subjective knowledge, by contrast, only had a weak effect on attitude formation. The study concludes by discussing future research opportunities on anti-refugee sentiment in an African context.

Hundreds of violent incidents of anti‐immigrant hate crimes have been recorded in South Africa over the past two decades. Understanding how the public views this issue helps us better understand how it can be resolved. The paper identifies determinants of public attitudes towards anti‐xenophobia strategies. Data from the South African Social Attitudes Survey for the period 2015–2018 were used for this study. Using these data, the link between anti‐immigrant sentiment and lay attributes of anti‐immigrant violence can be mapped. The results show that most citizens externalise the causes of this kind of hate crime and blame the victims (i.e., foreigners) for the conflict. What people believe about the etiology of an intergroup conflict was found to influence their desire for conflict resolution as well as the type of solutions preferred. Victim blaming was found to predict the adoption of prejudicial solutions to anti‐immigrant hate crime (such as the mass expulsion of foreign nationals). If an individual attributed the violence to the internal attributes (e.g., emotional factors or beliefs about foreign nationals) of the perpetrators, they were more likely to adopt progressive solutions (such as education and awareness campaigns).

The policing response to rising protest action in the country has received increased attention in the last decade. This is particularly owing to concerns over confrontations during which protesters have been arrested, injured and in some instances killed by the police. Despite the criticism voiced by various stakeholders about the manner in which the police manage crowd gatherings, relatively little is known about the views of South African adults on the policing of protest action and the factors that shape such attitudes. To provide some insight, this article draws on data from a specialised module on protest-related attitudes and behaviour that was fielded as part of the 2016 round of the Human Sciences Research Council's South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS) series. This nationally representative survey included specific questions probing the public's overall evaluation of the performance of the police in dealing with protests, and the justifiability of the use of force in policing protest action. The article will present a national picture of people's views on the policing of protest, based on these measures, and then determine the extent to which there are distinct underlying socio-demographic cleavages in these data. A combination of bivariate and multivariate analysis is undertaken in order to understand how perceptions of effectiveness, acceptability and reported participation in protest (especially disruptive and violent actions) shape people's views regarding policing of protest. The article concludes with a discussion that reflects on the implications of the research for the policing of protest action in future, given the appreciable rise in the incidence of protest since the mid-2000s and the mounting tensions between state institutions and communities over the political, moral and constitutional arguments for and against such actions.