Zenker, Olaf 2015 This article takes as its starting point a peculiar land claim within the ongoing South African land restitution process – more specifically, the legal and administrative technicalities that allowed for the implosion of the accompanying court case in the Land Claims Court – to open up a space for reflection on the ambiguous nature of state bureaucracies as ambiguity-reducing machines. Tracing the specificities of bureaucratic attempts at foreclosing ambiguities and insufficiencies in state practice, I show how a reorientation towards the new public goods of ‘service delivery’, ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ brought about a pronounced regime of performance indicators and de-judicialized bureaucratic flexibility. Demonstrating how these attempts to reduce ambiguities created new zones of ambiguity and unaccountability of their own, I argue for a post-Weberian analysis of the path-dependent realities of ‘bureaucratic authority’ to help us understand the seemingly arbitrary structural violence that state bureaucracies often enact. application/pdf https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/305450 https://folia.unifr.ch/documents/305450/files/2015_Zenker_Dejudicialization.pdf eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.3167/ca.2015.330107 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess License undefined The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. - Berghahn. - 2015, vol. 33, no. 1, p. 81-96 Accountability Ambiguity Land claims Law Performance indicator Post-Weberianism South Africa State info:eu-repo/classification/udc/39 De-judicialization, Outsourced Review and All-too-flexible Bureaucracies in South African Land Restitution http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501