Robins, Steven. "Civil Society’ & Popular Politics in the Postcolony: ‘Deep Democracy’ & Deep Authoritarianism at the Tip of Africa?". In From Revolution to Rights in South Africa: Social Movements, NGOs and Popular Politics After Apartheid, 77-99, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013.

Robins, Steven. "Civil Society’ & Popular Politics in the Postcolony: ‘Deep Democracy’ & Deep Authoritarianism at the Tip of Africa?". In From Revolution to Rights in South Africa: Social Movements, NGOs and Popular Politics After Apartheid, 77-99,  Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013.

• In 2002, Sheela Patel, an activist for the rights of slum-dwellers and homeless in Mumbai visited Cape Town to spread information about campaign to establish financial self-governance and empowerment for the poorest in India, South Africa, and elsewhere through international cooperation of groups such as the South African Homeless People’s Federation. During this time, it seemed a perfect example of 'deep democracy' and grassroots globalization (77-78).
• By 2005, the conditions of slum-dwellers activism in South Africa had fundamentally changed. Rather than representing deep democracy, the slum-dwellers associations had collapsed due to financial mismanagement. The remaining organization was dominated by a hierarchical group in the Victoria Mxenge housing projects which tightly controlled federation resources and excluded rival groups (78).
• The author uses the failure of democratic forms of governance in the Victoria Mxenge housing projects to highlight larger issues with 'deep democratization' among grassroots social movements, particularly in the inability of pro-democracy groups to institutionalize democratic norms (78-79).
• " The case study of the SAHPF-VMx draws attention to the Janus-faced character of ‘civil society’: its democratic and emancipatory face, as well as its illiberal and authoritarian underbelly" (79).
• Discussions of African politics in scholarly literature focus on the illiberal and 'uncivilized' aspects of the continent's politics, emphasizing Africa as an 'other' to the rational politics in the rest of the world. This unhelpful and untrue dichotomy cements notions of Africa as essentially undemocratic, ignoring the more important structural factors which prevent the poor in Africa and elsewhere from operating out informal patronage networks (80).
• Most scholarly literature on citizenship treats client-patron relationship as a negative and fundamentally anti-democratic form of citizenship, whereas in many parts of the world it makes up an important avenue of political action. While patronage can be disempowering, it also creates a reciprocal relationship in which both parties still exercise power (82).
• Almost no political actors in developing countries only engage in a single form of politics. Citizens involved in patronage systems can also act as legal persons by invoking legal rights in courts, or vote as liberal citizens. The existence of patronage does not mean that other forms of politics are absent (83).
• The contrasting and simultaneous coexistence of formal and informal politics is demonstrated by the formal structure of the post-apartheid, non-discriminatory, and liberal democratic South African government, and the range of traditional African Bantustan leaders, corrupt politicians, and mob bosses replete in the actual performance of South African politics (84).
• Concepts such as 'global citizenship' and 'global civil society' have an increased currency among academic communities, which often support the neoliberal bandwagon proclaiming the failure of the nation-state and the necessity of private enterprise or civil society filling in gaps in services (85).
• During the struggle against apartheid, activists attempted to make the black-majority townships surrounding Cape Town ungovernable. These sites of popular resistance are now reinterpreted as areas of discord, failure, and the threat of criminal action against the continuing racial and class inequalities. The same types of resistance to apartheid are now condemned as destructive and opposition to evictions and policing is dismantled with repression and the cutoff of essential services (86).
• Many of these techniques, especially the registration and self-conducted census of residents in informal slum areas, are designed to purposefully increase state awareness of individuals and thus empower both individuals and groups to be more successful in making legal claims on the basis of citizens' rights (93).
• The activities of the Homeless Peoples' Federation in Cape Town are based on the simultaneous accumulation of financial and social capital through the integration of community-building exercises into the collection of funds. They also encourage the distribution of skills, so that one slum-dweller teaches another slum-dweller a skill for repairing, maintaining, or surviving in the slums (90).
• The Homeless Peoples' Federation subsidiary in the Victoria Mxenge housing projects in Phillipi, Cape Town, is mainly composed of poor, black women from the urban area participating in the saving schemes and community education initiatives encouraged by the Federation (91).
• Whereas the official ideology of the Homeless Peoples' Federation and its global partner, Slum Dwellers International, stresses decentralized and non-hierarchical empowerment, the Federation in Victoria Mxenge opposed anything other than central financial control, which was often used as a power mechanism, because purchased land was distributed based on patronage networks (93-95).
• Part of the disparity between mostly successful democratic organizations among Indian slum-dwellers and the undemocratic organization in Victoria Mxenge projects is explained by not fully participating in the social capital building exercises, largely because the relatively better connected members of the South African projects found it unnecessary to attracting patronage, whereas it was necessary in India (95).
• The South African organization also maintained a very different relationship with the government, as many members had previously experience in the womens' arm of the African National Congress, and viewed access to state patronage networks as key for the success of the organization, even though it undermined the non-hierarchical goals of the Federation (96).
• "Notwithstanding the democratic deficits documented in the VMx case, PD and SAHPF were nonetheless highly successful in mobilising rights to state resources by leveraging access to housing subsidies and securing donor funding that financed the building of thousands of houses in Phillipi, and elsewhere in South Africa" (99).