Join us for a presentation on Laurent Fourchard’s research paper aiming to understand how people have tried to produce an orderly township within the remnants of the Colonial and apartheid South African state. It looks especially at the everyday routine of organisations that operate in Cape Town colored townships and which are locally referred as neighbourhood watches, safety sector or street committees. From within the township, there is a large consensus on the necessity to produce a social order that needs to both protect and discipline children and youth. Observation of night patrols helps to understand how this consensus is accepted and mocked, perceived by different members as necessary and/ or useless. In many cases, discourses and practices of neighbourhood social control are the result of a not easy co-production between local members and state officials. This co-production helps questioning the literature on vigilantism, community police and more generally on the fabric of the ‘state from below’ in South Africa and beyond. The paper will be followed by a brief introduction of a new three year research programme coordinated by Laurent Fourchard on “The politics of xenophobic exclusion: mobilisations, local orders and violence” which includes among other institutions, the Centre of Governance and Human Rights at the University of Cambridge.