Description:

November 19, 4pm

Informers, Intelligence Recruitment, and Apartheid Counterinsurgency

Daniel Douek, Political Science, Concordia University

Colonial states in Africa operated through various forms of indirect rule backed by violence or the threat of violence. This required elaborate networks of informers and spies within African communities. Moreover, colonial governments typically enforced repression using battalions of African soldiers alongside or instead of European troops. Nowhere did the colonial state perfect the strategy of recruiting Africans to fight colonial wars better than in apartheid South Africa. Drawing on interviews and archival data, this talk will analyze the use of informers by the apartheid state in its counterinsurgency war against the African National Congress before and during South Africa's 1990-94 transition to democracy.

Bio: Daniel Douek is lecturer in the Political Science Department at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and a research fellow at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. His research focuses on insurgency and counterinsurgency in South Africa.