Abstract
What can we learn from the baby boomer experience of police conflict management in South Africa? To get some insight into this question the author chose autoethnography as a method. The baby boomer generation, to which the author belongs, was an integral part of the lived experience of a particularly poignant period in South Africa’s history. The author therefore chose two friends and former colleagues from the same generation to be research associates. With South African history as the background (starting with the pre-colonial phase and then proceeding through the colonial, apartheid, and the “democratic” phases), the author utilises four stories in a quest for learning: a personal narrative serves as the first story, the individual narratives of two of the research associates as the second story, relevant theoretical reflection represents the third story, while the fourth story covers the research narrative. Data collection for stories one and two makes extensive use of personal memory data, acculturation, and self-reflective data, while data analysis was done through the qualitative elements of coding, clustering, and theme development. Adverse political influence on policing in South Africa was identified as the dominant emerging theme, a situation echoed in other research findings.
Reviewer: Michelle N. Elliasson
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Botha, C. (2023). Police Conflict Management in South Africa: An Autoethnographic Reconnaissance. In: Staller, M.S., Koerner, S., Zaiser, B. (eds) Police Conflict Management, Volume I. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41096-3_15
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