| This thesis analyses the discourses and practices of legal aid institutions in post-apartheid South Africa. Based on fieldwork carried out in Durban and Cape Town over two months, it examines the contribution of these institutions towards a larger project of constitutionalism, nation-building, and state-consolidation. At the same time, it interrogates how this project falls short and is resisted in many ways by different social actors. The continuing salience of racial and spatial politics for legal aid clients, lawyers, and administrators shows that the legacies of apartheid continue to have a bearing on the way legal aid institutions and state law are perceived and engaged with in South Africa. Thus, these legal interventions are neither uniformly accepted nor rejected and their role in the project of nation-building remains unstable. |
