Democracy`s Infrastructure – Techno–Politics and Protest after Apartheid: Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology

"Why does protest in contemporary South Africa focus on seemingly apolitical things such as leaky pipes and water meters? What do these inconspicuous infrastructures tell us about the state's attempt to fashion new democratic citizens? Grounded in deep ethnography, von Schnitzler's book is an imaginative work about the everyday technologies and popular illegalities that form postapartheid life in South Africa."--Brian Larkin, author of Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria

"Democracy's Infrastructure takes an incisive, illuminating look at the technopolitics of water in South Africa. Through close and careful observation, this book reveals how specific technological mechanisms enable and constrain government projects, and how forms of measurement and pricing shape new, market-oriented subjects. This is a major contribution, one that joins the study of social movements and political resistance to the new anthropology of infrastructure in an entirely convincing way."--James Ferguson, author of Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution

"Using the example of the prepaid water meter as a starting point, this richly interdisciplinary book explores the politics of infrastructure in post-apartheid South Africa. Its argument is built on extensive primary research combined with a thorough grounding in a wide range of existing literature."--Matthew Gandy, University of Cambridge

"A theoretically savvy account of how the distribution of prepaid technologies in apartheid South Africa dovetailed with the emergence of new forms of neoliberal governance, Democracy's Infrastructure shows how technology continues to animate life there today. One of the most innovative post-apartheid studies in recent years, this is required reading for those interested in understanding the complexities of the South African democratic transition."--Steven Robins, University of Stellenbosch