"South Africa is not the only developing country where public transport is largely provided by the informal sector, but it is the only one where, for the last 20 years, deadly armed confrontations on public roads between informal operators and their official public transport competition have been in the news. This paper examines a number of questions about this problem, including what the significance is of these so-called "taxi wars": whether they represent the criminalization of an entire economic sector, the failure of security agencies, or the accommodating attitude of authorities; and whether these conflicts mark the limits of economic and social modernization, or the failure of the policy aimed at bringing informal operators into the formal economy since the collapse of Apartheid."