Bureaucracy and Race overturns the common assumption that apartheid in South Africa was enforced only through terror and coercion. Without understating the role of violent intervention, Ivan Evans shows that apartheid was sustained by a great and ever-swelling bureaucracy. The Department of Native Affairs (DNA), which had dwindled during the last years of the segregation regime, unexpectedly revived and became the arrogant, authoritarian fortress of apartheid after 1948. The DNA was a major player in the prolonged exclusion of Africans from citizenship and the establishment of a...

The book deals with the inherent violence of "race relations" in two important countries that remain iconic expressions of white supremacy in the twentieth century. Cultures of Violence does not just reconstruct the era of violence, however. Instead, it convincingly contrasts the "lynch culture" of the South to the "bureaucratic culture of violence" in South Africa. By contrasting mobs of rope-wielding white Southerners to the gun-toting policemen and administrators who formally defended white supremacy in South Africa, Cultures of Violence employs racial killing as an optic for examining the...