PurposeGlobally, over 95% of fire related deaths and injuries occur in low- and middle-income countries. Within informal settlements, the risk of fire resulting in injury or death is particularly high. This paper examines fire risks in informal settlements in New Delhi and Cape Town, and tented informal settlements in Lebanon.Design/methodology/approachOur analysis draws on primary sources, secondary literature, statistical data and qualitative interviews.FindingsThe distribution of fire risk across urban societies is a fundamentally political issue. Residential fire risk can be tackled by accessible, affordable, safety-compliant housing. That said, important interim measures can be taken to mitigate fire risk. Some of the risks requiring attention are similar across our case studies, driven by high population densities; flammable housing materials; unreliable or inaccessible access to safe power sources; and – in the case of Cape Town and New Delhi particularly – the inability of fire services to reach sites of fire. However, these common risks are embedded in distinct social, economic and political contexts that must be placed at the center of any intervention. Interventions must also be aware that the risk of fire is not spread evenly within informal settlements, intersecting as it does with factors like gender, age, health and disability.Originality/valueInformal settlement fires have been under-studied to date. The studies that do exist tend to operate within disciplinary silos. This paper represents an important interdisciplinary approach to fire within informal settlements, which grounds technical data, modeling and experiments in political, social and economic realities.

The work of Giorgio Agamben has been widely used by criminologists and others to explore policing and sovereignty across the globe. In this article, I explore Agamben’s conceptual framework, focusing on the commonly deployed ideas of ‘state of exception’ and ‘ homo sacer’. I highlight the limitations of Agamben’s legalistic theories, and argue that they leave us with an impoverished understanding of how sovereignty is negotiated in everyday life. As I demonstrate, scholars who have attempted to adapt Agamben’s ideas have failed to overcome these limitations in his analysis. I conclude that we must look for new ways forward and introduce the concept of ‘permissive space’ as an alternative to Agamben’s theoretical framework: an idea that allows a more nuanced and comprehensive analysis. Drawing on 10 months of fieldwork in Durban, South Africa, I illustrate the utility of this terminology for our analysis of policing.

The expansive literature on law and justice across Africa emphasizes why people do not use lower state courts. Consequently, a striking lack of attention is paid to how and why people do engage with lower state courts. Drawing on a systematic literature review and a multi-sited qualitative study, we make three contributions on this topic. First, we explore how this academic gap emerged. Second, we critique the procedural justice model that currently underlies much ‘access to justice’ programming, which seeks to improve citizens’ engagements with the courts. In place of what we describe as its arithmetic assumptions about institutional engagement, value, and legitimacy, we propose a trifactor framework. Citizen engagement, we argue, occurs as people reconcile how they think the courts should act, how they expect them to act, and how they need them to act in any given instance. Third, drawing on our empirical studies, we highlight that this framework is flexible enough to capture people’s actually existing decision-making in a wide variety of settings and to map how those trade-offs shift throughout the process of their case, providing important insights into ideas of justice and statehood.

Civic-led banishment, a fundamentally spatial punishment, is an understudied phenomenon in South Africa and beyond. We define it as "a punitive spatial practice, enacted by non-state actors in response to alleged criminality or deviance, which attempts varying degrees of socio-spatial expulsion over time". This definition lays the framework for a socio-spatial analysis of punishment, and yields insights into the exercise of socio-spatial control in public and private space. We emphasise the specific challenges associated with banishment, together with the relationship between space, punishment, public authority, and sovereignty. We demonstrate how "negotiations" around banishment trade off two forms of intersecting precarity: those faced by residents in informal settlements and the potential precarity of public authorities. Finally, we argue that an exploration of all forms of punishment through the lens of sociospatial expulsion enables us to tap into conversations around penal abolitionism.