The study, conducted by Dorcas Khosa of the Department of Criminology and Security Science at the University of South Africa, treats the cluster as an occasion for theory building rather than as a statistical sample. Using a structured comparison of four incidents selected against a stated threshold definition, Khosa asks what account of governance best explains the pattern of where the attacks happened, why they recurred, and how the state responded. The answer, she argues, lies not in any single institutional weakness but in the simultaneous attenuation of four kinds of authority at the same locations: regulatory, spatial, economic and intelligence. It is the conjunction of these attenuations, rather than any one of them, that produces the exposure on which coordinated attacks depend.

The venues themselves tell much of the story. Two of the four incidents occurred at unlicensed liquor outlets, premises the state has the statutory authority to license, inspect and close under the Gauteng Liquor Act of 2003 but does not effectively control. Police reported closing more than eleven thousand illegal taverns and making over eighteen thousand arrests for illegal liquor trading in a single six-month period, figures that describe a regime overwhelmed by an informal sector it cannot absorb rather than a successful enforcement campaign. South African research has long established an association between the density and trading hours of alcohol outlets and levels of interpersonal violence, making the regulatory gap a plausible contributor to exposure at these sites.

The firearms dimension compounds the failure. South Africa has a comparatively strict Firearms Control Act, yet the weapons recovered at several scenes, including AK-47 pattern rifles and nine-millimetre pistols, circulate in an illicit market the statute does not reach, replenished by theft, corruption in the chain of custody and cross-border trafficking. The case of a senior officer in the Gauteng firearm licence division who sold decommissioned police weapons into the gang economy over years, documented by crime analyst Mark Shaw, shows that the custody system inside the state itself can supply the illicit market. A regime that governs the licensed minority effectively while the illicit majority flows freely, Khosa argues, is regulating the wrong population.

Spatial governance forms the second domain of the diagnosis. The venues of the cluster, a hostel shebeen, a township tavern, an informal settlement and a taxi on a peri-urban road, all occupy the margins of formal urban administration. Informal settlements such as Jumpers lack formal addressing, reliable lighting, planned access routes and an effective municipal presence, making them partially illegible to the state, which cannot easily see, service or secure what it has not mapped. The assailants at Cleveland moved through the settlement for an hour in a space that afforded cover, multiple entrances and a low probability of timely response. Khosa is careful to note that legibility pursued as clearance would displace residents into equally illegible and equally exposed spaces, and she argues instead for upgrading in place, which serves both the resident’s claim on services and the state’s capacity to respond.

The third domain is economic. Bekkersdal and Cleveland both lie amid the abandoned gold workings of the Witwatersrand, where informal miners known as zama zamas operate in and around disused shafts. Research establishes that illegal mining in South Africa is organised, territorial and unusually violent by continental standards, diverting output estimated well in excess of fourteen billion rand a year and drawing migrant labour from Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe into its most exposed positions. At Meyerton both the victims and the suspects were Lesotho nationals, an observation about how the violence is embedded in transnational networks of labour, contraband and firearms rather than an argument about migration as a cause of crime, a claim the study explicitly examines and rejects. Where an extractive rent is available and lawful economic access to it is absent, territorial control passes to armed actors and disputes are settled by force.

The fourth domain concerns the security apparatus itself. The deficit here is specific: not a shortage of investigative competence, since suspects were identified and arrested in several cases, including eleven arrests within days at Bekkersdal, but the near-total absence of preventive intelligence. Coordinated attacks on known high-risk premises, in areas known to be contested by armed illicit economies, recurred without apparent interruption. Khosa formalises this as a reactive equilibrium: a security apparatus whose capability is concentrated after the event lowers the perceived probability of interruption, which lowers the expected cost of a coordinated attack and sustains recurrence. The signature of the attacks, assailants arriving and departing in vehicles and moving through a space in a sustained sweep, is consistent with an expectation of impunity.

Against this diagnosis, Khosa tests nine rival explanations, from under-policing and firearm availability to organised criminal competition, gang dynamics, prosecutorial attrition, state capture, migration, structural violence and contagion. Each accounts for part of the picture, she finds, but none explains siting, recurrence and the asymmetry between investigative success and preventive failure within a single account. The governance framework she develops, drawing on human security, nodal and polycentric governance and the security-development nexus, is organised around four principles: integration, prevention, inclusion and development. It is anchored in Sustainable Development Goal 16, which commits states to reduce violence and promote effective institutions, converting safety outcomes into development targets that are budgeted, tracked and publicly reported.

The framework’s central implication is its most provocative claim: accountability assigned by function will continue to leave the interstice ungoverned, because every authority can discharge its own mandate in full while the composite risk remains unowned. The institutional innovation the cluster demands, Khosa argues, is a governing node accountable for the space itself, such as a statutory Provincial Safety Governance Council with binding authority over police command, liquor licensing, municipalities, mining and home affairs functions. She proposes a sequenced programme: within twelve months, convening the council and auditing the police firearm chain of custody; within one to two years, statutory data-sharing obligations and a graduated liquor compliance pathway; over three to ten years, settlement upgrading at scale and regulation of small-scale mining.

Khosa is candid about the limits of her argument. The framework was built from four incidents in one province over twelve months, selected because the outcome occurred, and it has not been tested against comparable spaces where no attack followed. Its propositions are claims about a mechanism rather than findings about its strength, and she calls for a case-control study of incident and matched non-incident sites paired with interviews establishing what risk information existed before each attack. Yet the lesson she draws is specific enough to state without that work. The attacks occurred where four kinds of authority thinned out at once, and reactive intensification does not reach that condition, because force applied after the event operates on the consequences of interstitial exposure while leaving its production untouched. For unequal, rapidly urbanising societies across the global South, the decisive question is not how much security the state can supply but how well it can govern the margins where formal authority thins out. The alternative, she concludes, is to keep arriving after the shooting has stopped.

Subject of Research: Governance failures behind recurrent mass shootings in Gauteng, South Africa, and a proposed developmental security framework

Article Title: Recurrent mass shootings and the governance of insecurity in South Africa: towards a developmental security framework

Article References: Khosa, D. (2026). Recurrent mass shootings and the governance of insecurity in South Africa: towards a developmental security framework. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1929165. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1929165

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1929165

Keywords: South Africa, mass shootings, security governance, Gauteng, illegal mining, SDG 16, developmental security, crime prevention, Recurrent, mass, shootings, governance

The study draws on the GLOBE survey, an online questionnaire titled “International Organizations and the Future of Global Governance” administered between May and November 2021. The survey reached 1,004 staff members across 30 international organizations, with an 8.4 percent response rate that matches comparable elite surveys in the field. For this analysis, the authors narrowed the sample to 451 responses from four critical global governance sectors: trade, finance, security and climate change. Respondents were carefully selected—only secretariat members with policy-related roles were included, excluding purely administrative personnel, consultants and locally hired staff. To validate the sample, the researchers compared its demographic composition against official UN staff statistics covering 116,388 employees from 38 organizations, finding a reasonable approximation of the broader international civil service.

The survey’s first major contribution is a new empirical variable: perceived autonomy. Respondents rated, on a five-point scale, how autonomous their organization is from the influence of individual member states across five policy functions—settling disputes between member states, setting policies and strategies, reviewing internal operations, establishing organizational norms, and ensuring compliance. The results reveal moderate autonomy overall, with a weighted mean of 2.92, just below the midpoint of the scale. Scores across the 18 organizations analyzed ranged from 2.2 to 3.5, indicating meaningful variation but no dramatic outliers. Notably, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Trade scored highest at 3.5, followed closely by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group at 3.49, the International Organization of Securities Commissions at 3.4, and DG CLIMA at 3.32. At the bottom of the ranking sat the Financial Stability Board at 2.2, NATO at 2.3, and the OSCE and Mercosur, both at 2.6.

Perhaps the most technically interesting finding concerns where autonomy is strongest and weakest within organizations. Staff perceive their institutions as most autonomous in reviewing internal operations, with a mean of 3.27, and in norm-setting, at 3.26. This suggests that international bureaucracies enjoy considerable discretion over their own administrative machinery, largely insulated from direct state interference. Autonomy drops sharply, however, in functions that expose organizations to external political pressure. Policy-setting scores a mean of just 2.62, and dispute resolution between member states falls to the lowest level at 2.57. In other words, the closer an organization’s activity moves to the contested politics of its member states, the less independent its staff feel—a pattern consistent with principal-agent theory, which holds that states retain their tightest control over the most consequential delegations of authority.

The researchers benchmarked these perceptions against two established quantitative datasets: the International Authority Database, which measures de jure authority across seven policy functions, and the Measure of International Authority dataset, which tracks delegation and pooling of legal authority. The comparison produced instructive convergences and divergences. The security sector scored lowest in both datasets—0.25 in the IAD and 0.27 in MIA delegation—and staff perceptions confirmed this, with a sector mean of 2.68, the lowest of the four. Trade, which ranks highest in MIA delegation at 0.44, delivered a correspondingly high perceived autonomy of 3.17. But the within-sector variation proved more striking than the between-sector differences. The finance sector contains both one of the most autonomous organizations in the sample, IOSCO at 3.4, and one of the least, the Financial Stability Board at 2.2. Similarly, trade spans the entire spectrum, from DG TRADE at the top to Mercosur near the bottom.

The study’s second axis examined horizontal interactions—how staff perceive their dealings with other international organizations. Here the findings challenge a core assumption of the regime complexity literature. Scholars have long warned that dense, overlapping governance architectures produce “governance congestion”: conflicting mandates, coordination failures and institutional rivalry that degrade policy outcomes. Yet when asked to rate challenges such as overlapping responsibilities, implementation of field actions, hierarchical relations, competition and the involvement of too many actors, staff reported relatively few problems. The weighted overall score was 3.72 on a five-point scale where higher values indicate fewer difficulties—clearly above the midpoint and closer to “somewhat problematic” than to genuinely problematic. Mercosur, the WTO and IOSCO reported the smoothest inter-organizational relations, while the African Union at 2.99 and UNEP at 3.18 reported the most friction.

Sectoral patterns in these interactions are statistically robust. Trade organizations reported the fewest challenges, with a sector mean of 3.97, followed by finance at 3.81, security at 3.71 and climate change at 3.46. Pairwise t-tests confirmed that most of these differences are significant, with the largest gap between trade and climate change, where the t-statistic reached approximately 12.19. Within the issue-level breakdown, the implementation of field actions was the least problematic challenge overall, with a weighted mean of 3.92, while the involvement of too many actors was the most troublesome at 3.39. This last finding is telling: it suggests that the primary friction in global governance is not rivalry between organizations but sheer institutional crowding—too many players at the table, particularly in the fragmented climate regime, where UNFCCC and UNEP staff both flagged actor proliferation as a leading concern.

The sector-specific results map closely onto what institutional theory would predict, with some surprises. In finance, the pillar-like structure of the sector—where IOSCO monopolizes securities regulation and the Bank for International Settlements occupies a unique niche with no direct competitors—translated into minimal reported inter-organizational conflict. The IMF scored 3.01 on perceived autonomy versus the BIS at 2.73, confirming that the Fund enjoys greater internal discretion, especially over reviewing its own operations, but remains constrained in dispute resolution and policy-setting, echoing scholarship that portrays the IMF as a negotiation arena shaped by powerful members. In security, the dominance of member states and the veto politics of the UN Security Council produced the lowest autonomy perceptions, with NATO and the OSCE particularly exposed—though the IAEA, acting as a coordinating body, bucked the trend. The African Union emerged as the sample’s clearest case of governance congestion, reporting the highest difficulties across overlapping mandates, competition and crowded coordination spaces.

The climate change sector delivered the study’s most sobering portrait. Consistent with the fragmentation literature pioneered by scholars like Keohane and Victor, climate staff reported the most problematic interactions of any sector, driven by hierarchical tensions, competition and the proliferation of actors ranging from UN bodies to city networks like C40. Yet the sector also displayed a sharp internal divide: DG CLIMA and C40 staff perceived high autonomy, while UN institutions recorded significantly lower scores. Taken together, the findings suggest that fears of systemic governance congestion may be overstated for well-structured, functionally specialized regimes like trade and finance, but remain valid for fragmented domains like climate and security. The authors frame their study as an exploratory first step, calling for longitudinal research on how budget changes, external political shocks and shifting ideologies in key member states translate into the internal behavior of international bureaucracies—and ultimately into the policy outcomes that affect us all.

Subject of Research: Perceived autonomy and inter-organizational interactions among international organization staff across global governance sectors

Article Title: Inside global governance: perspectives of international organization staff on autonomy and horizontal interactions

Article References: Holesch, A., Jordana, J., Marx, A., & Schmitt, L. (2025). Inside global governance: perspectives of international organization staff on autonomy and horizontal interactions. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(3), 205-228. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00110-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00110-2

Keywords: international organizations, global governance, bureaucratic autonomy, regime complexity, GLOBE survey, WTO, IMF, climate governance, security governance, trade governance, international bureaucracies, member states