SOUTH AFRICA'S CONSTITUTION AND THE LAW OF THE TOWNSHIP, looting from below

230pp., paperback, First SA Edition, Wits University Press, Johannesburg, 2026

ISBN: 9781997494157

First published in the UK and USA in 2025.

David Dickinson investigates how township residents are responding to socio-economic inequality and a pervasive sense that the country’s democratic transition has not delivered on its constitutional promises of social justice by taking advantage of existing, often illicit or illegal, opportunities: electricity theft, informal charges to access the Social Relief of Distress grant, fare evasion on the Metrorail, the illicit sale of alcohol during Covid-19 prohibition, medical aid scams and looting.

Demonstrating how corruption at the grassroots level relates to elite eploitation, his study complicates the view that state capture is the primary cause of the country’s current systemic difficulties and that the application of the Constitution can bring South Africa back on track.

David Dickinson is an attorney at Lawyers for Human Rights and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand.