Democratic Transition In Africa Research Articles

Ubuntu diplomacy: Broadening soft power in an African context

Ubuntu is an African philosophical worldview that has increasingly gained prominence since South Africa's democratic transition in 1994. It places emphasis on the world's common humanity and its consequent interdependence. Through content analysis, the article examines the soft power that is inherent in South Africa's foreign policy, as codified in the 2011 White Paper on South African Foreign Policy–Building a Better World: Diplomacy of Ubuntu. In its findings, the article established a distinction between Joseph Nye's original conceptualization of soft power, formulated from a United States realist foreign policy perspective, and the one inherent in South Africa's humanist foreign policy guided by the philosophy of Ubuntu. This distinction is premised on the geopolitical disparities between the two nations. The article further examines South Africa's wielding of soft power within the African continent, the first audience of the country's diplomacy of Ubuntu.

William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises

William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises

Declassified: moving beyond the dead end of race in South Africa by Gerhard Maré

Reviewed by: Declassified: moving beyond the dead end of race in South Africa by Gerhard Maré Caryn Abrahams (bio) Gerhard Maré (2014) Declassified: moving beyond the dead end of race in South Africa. Auckland Park: Jacana, Gerhard Maré's book Declassified, published 20 years after South Africa's democratic transition, takes an exploratory approach to the question of race in contemporary South Africa. In his own words, this approach 'is filled with "what if" questions, deliberately to explore, to see where they take us if we discard, even if just for the moment, the limits set by acceptance of race as a given, the limits to our thinking and to our sense of our own agency' (173). Declassified provides strong cause for academics and other public intellectuals to question the otherwise unquestioned bedrock of 'race' in South Africa as a self-evident aspect of South African society. The book's intention is to compel a rethinking of South African society, disrupting the notion that this is 'just the way things are' (56). Maré argues in his book that the racialised context of South Africa does not reflect reality, but creates reality. The book seeks to critique race as the process of classification and identification that permeates every area of South African life, where even demographic information becomes laden with meaning, judgment and patterns of belief (51). This racialised template operates in South Africa in both everyday and institutional ways. It allows the continuity of group claims and social attitudes (54) and gains perpetual analytical meaningfulness because it is used and 'guarded' by the state (28). Maré argues that race-thinking guides everyday cognition, sense-making and behaviour, it facilitates race populism (mobilisation on the basis of race), and it serves power. [End Page 71] The book begins with a personal reflection of the reach and insidiousness of race-thinking. He tells the poignant story of his mother's burial and the instance of cemetery staff that she be classified 'correctly' for appropriate ceremonial purposes. For Maré, race-thinking is so pervasive that it proves difficult to escape even when one dies. The rest of the book follows his considered conviction that racialisation is morally indefensible and an anathema to human dignity. The book makes a number of important contributions. The first is the definition of non-racialism as a complete rejection of the existence of races and the discursive consequences of this self-evident racialisation. While the author does not deny that there have been real social consequences of racial classification, he makes the point that another consequence of racialisation has been an ongoing demand for these categories to be maintained. He also argues that the current meaning of non-racialism, as put forward by the African National Congress, has fallen short since it focused on undoing the consequences of race-based policy without rejecting race as a 'valid category of human distinction' (79). Instead, that version of non-racialism leaves those categories intact, despite the fact that they have been challenged, disrupted and refuted in a myriad of ways. He also astutely points out that when non-racialism is used as the rationale for redress and racial justice it only entrenches difference based on race since it relies on and maintains racialisation. The second contribution of the book is in its analysis of 'statecraft' and how racialised templates form an integral part of bureaucratic practice. Racialisation, Maré argues, has continued long after the political transition in South Africa in 1994. He details how the democratic South African government retains and recreates systemic racialisation in the present day. He argues that the state template of race is, in addition, morally indefensible because it also exonerates capitalism as a system of injustice, making racialised redress an acceptable evil. Maré's explication of the institutionalised machinery of race in the South African state presents a vexing problem in the democratic era especially since it is employed to fix the very legacy of classification in the first place, and is implicated in the way capital and race privilege mutually reinforce each other. The third contribution of this book is in its critique of equality as a notion of demographic redress where a greater...

RETHINKING NARRATIVES OF REMOVAL AND RESISTANCE IN POSTAPARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA - Pamela Reynolds. War in Worcester: Youth and the Apartheid State. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. xii +239 pp. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00. Cloth. $26.00. Paper. - Dawne Y. Curry. Apartheid on a Black Isle: Removal and Resistance in Alexandra, South Africa. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012.

Pamela Reynolds. War in Worcester: Youth and the Apartheid State. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. xii +239 pp. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00. Cloth. $26.00. Paper.Dawne Y. Curry. Apartheid on a Black Isle: Removal and Resistance in Alexandra, South Africa. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. xvi + 180 pp. List of Tables. List of Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $95.00. Paper.Lauretta Ngcobo, ed. Prodigal Daughters: Stories of South Women in Exile. Scottsville, S.A.: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012. xxix + 211 pp. Photographs. $34.00, R195.00. Paper.Sean Field. Oral History, Community, and Displacement Imagining Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Palgrave Studies in Oral History, xvi + 221 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $100.00. Paper.In the wake of South Africa's democratic transition, we have witnessed a proliferation of narratives that attempt to highlight the role that ordinary South Africans played in the antiapartheid struggle. Oral histories and memory work have been key to creating these narratives and have formed a crucial part of social history, particularly in its accounts of forced removal and antiapartheid resistance. This overview of four recent works leads us to rethink narratives of resistance and removal and to interrogate the categories and concepts on which they are based.Pamela Reynold's War in Worcester examines youth under the apartheid state and the role young people played in bringing an end to oppression. The book examines youths' refusal to accept the adulthood on offer under apartheid's political dispensation and takes on the violence of the state, its cruelty, and the intimacies of its warfare. Drawing on the narratives of fourteen young men identified under apartheid as African (11), Reynolds bases her study in Zwelethemba, a suburb of Worcester and a Coloured labor preference area, and attempts both an ethnography and a critique of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). She reveals how the commission's victim/perpetrator binary reduced these young activists to the role of civilians according to the Geneva Conventions and provided a platform on which they could relate their experiences only as victims. To avoid an ethnography of victimization, Reynolds studies both the TRC and black activists and draws on versions of the apartheid past that exist beyond both the commission's hearings and the National Congress's (ANC) formal narrative of the liberation struggle.The idea of war is central to this text. Reynolds discusses how what counts as war also determines who is recognized as a legitimate fighter. While liberation organizations drew on the Geneva Conventions and recognized the antiapartheid struggle as a war, the South government characterized this resistance as conflict with terrorists. The idea of war extends to how one conceives of children or youth in conflict situations. Reynolds demonstrates how the state under apartheid perceived the black child as unworthy of good governance and as a potential terrorist. Borrowing from Stanley Cavell, Reynolds takes the idea of the child as a necessary and undertheorized figure and asks when a child's process of political and ethical understanding of the world comes to an end, becomes no longer childlike.The central themes of War in Worcester include young men's experiences during the struggle and the TRC's approach to documenting that struggle, as well as its conceptualization of activism and victimhood. It investigates the triangulation among the commission, the activist, and the state; among the commission, the town of Zwelethemba, and the fourteen young men whose experiences Reynolds documents; and among the group, community, and individual. Through this ethnography, Reynolds grapples with the question of what it means to do research on youth in conflict and to study the young who engage in a fight voluntarily and without conscription. …

Literature, Remediation, Remedy (The Case of Transitional Justice)

In part to reflect on a “practical turn” in recent comparative literary criticism, this essay asks what role(s) writing and reading literature can play in the provision of remedy for historical injustice. Specifically, it looks at the case of South Africa's democratic transition through the lens of Chilean-Argentine author Ariel Dorfman's play Death and the Maiden, its staging and reception in Johannesburg and its inscription into the 1998 Final Report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). By juxtaposing a case of literary remediation (TRC Chairperson Desmond Tutu's curious insertion of a character from Dorfman's play into his Foreword to the Final Report) with contemporary manifestations of an older understanding of remediation as a process of medical healing or legal redress (ongoing campaigns by apartheid victims regarding their right to remedy), the essay draws attention to some of the limits of the literary as a site of praxis. At the same time, it suggests that attention to — or close reading of — moments where literary and other aesthetic characters and forms are drawn into the medical, psychological, legal, political, and economic realms can have practical value. Such inscriptions can create new constellations between the present and the past, and they can make visible continuities (or, conversely, discontinuities or misrecognitions) between desired and actual worlds. It is in this sense that remediation may aid in the work of remedy.

South Africa–Canada relations: a case of middle power (non)cooperation?

Setting the stage for a special section dedicated to interrogating the Canada–South Africa relationship, the paper finds the current South Africa–Canada relationship to be disconnected, fraught and uneasy. This comes as a surprise given the close ties forged during South Africa's democratic transition. In line with a history of support and shared membership of the Commonwealth, G20, Cairns Group and involvement in the Kimberley Process, it is assumed that both countries are natural allies on the international stage. Instead, South Africa and Canada have consistently been on opposite sides of big international problems. The paper considers whether apparent differences between traditional and emerging middle powers create challenges in fostering meaningful cooperation and advances a number of conceptual conditions important in understanding when and how middle power cooperation occurs. The authors examine an important condition for emerging middle powers in prioritising cooperative endeavours, aid and trade, and draw conclusions from the South Africa–Canada case.

Access to Medicines and the Transformation of the South African State: Exploring the Interactions of Legal and Policy Changes in Health, Intellectual Property, Trade, and Competition Law in the Context of South Africa's HIV/AIDS Pandemic

Access to essential medicines remains highly contested around the globe and a vital issue in South Africa. At the same time, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the demand for medical services are having important political and social consequences in a society heavily impacted by the pandemic. Legal and institutional changes within the postapartheid state in South Africa are in part a reflection of the interaction of opportunities and constraints both within and across the country's geographical boundaries. The transformation of state institutions in this context has been set in motion and shaped by different policy imperatives: from demands for medical care to the promotion of economic competition and the need to implement international trade commitments, including specific levels of intellectual property protection. Despite a strong commitment to social change, to address the legacies of apartheid, as well as the relative strength and political will of the dominant political party, the African National Congress, the transformation of a number of state institutions was significantly framed by the global environment in which the country found itself. In the context of South Africa's democratic transition and the devastating HIV/AIDS pandemic, the state responded to a range of shifting opportunities and constraints, whether real or perceived. As a result, impetus was given to different policies and competing political and economic factions, enabling particular institutions and rules to be embraced, created, reshaped, or simply foregone.

The Role of Constitution Making and Institution Building in Furthering Peace, Justice and Development: South Africa's Democratic Transition

The Role of Constitution Making and Institution Building in Furthering Peace, Justice and Development: South Africa's Democratic Transition

Location, Automotive Policy, and Multinational Strategy: The Position of South Africa in the Global Industry since 1995

ABSTRACTThe South African automotive sector has become much more integrated into the global industry since 1995. Rapid export expansion has shifted its orientation fundamentally away from its focus on the small domestic market and the industry is widely regarded as a success story of South Africa's democratic transition. However, important vulnerabilities remain, and it is by no means clear that the mode of integration has been particularly favorable to the long‐term development of the industry. The relatively small size of South Africa's domestic market and its regional location pose clear disadvantages in terms of attracting international investment. Integration into the global industry has therefore been partial and continues to reflect a degree of hesitancy by multinational firms to make really major commitments to the South African industry. The warning signs include recent import expansion and low local content in domestically assembled vehicles. Automotive policy has also produced distortions, encouraged uneconomic investments, and led to unforeseen side effects. These impacts limit the gains that have been made and are likely to cause complications in the future.

Responding to Global Constraints and Opportunities: Access to Medicines and the Impact of Intellectual Property and Competition Rules in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This article explores how institutional changes within a state are shaped by a mixture of events, opportunities and constraints, from both within and from across the country's geographical boundaries. Focusing on the interaction between different policy demands and imperatives: from demands for medical care to the promotion of economic competition and the need to implement international trade commitments, including specific levels of intellectual property protection. Within the context of South Africa's democratic transition and HIV/AIDS pandemic, I argue that despite a strong commitment to change, to address the legacies of apartheid, and the relative strength and political will of the dominant political party, the African National Congress, the transformation of the state was significantly framed by the global environment in which the state found itself. As the state responded to a range of shifting opportunities and constraints, whether real or perceived, so impetus was given to different policies and competing political and economic factions enabling particular institutions and rules to be embraced, created, reshaped or simply foregone.

1 - Introduction: Student Activism, Structural Adjustment and the Democratic Transition in Africa

University students in the period following independence were a transitory social group, who held well-founded expectations of rewarding and high-status employ- ment after graduation. In the 1970s many of these assurances began to erode as countries that had attempted to implement state-led development faced interna- tional recession and internal corruption and decay. State funding of higher educa- tion by the late 1970s was being targeted for restructuring by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Student activism was affected: while stu- dents clung onto a self-conscious elitism, the reality of student poverty and the financial crises of African universities transformed their activism. As well as see- ing their status as a privileged group collapse, there was an unprecedented ‘con- vergence of forces’ between students and the popular classes. This introduction surveys the role of students, the nature of their protest and their relationship with civil society in the processes that brought about a wave of multi-party elections and democratic struggles in Africa. The article critically intervenes in some of the most important debates on the role of student activism on the continent and intro- duces the contributions in this special issue devoted to student activism.

Transformation and Trouble: Crime, Justice, and Participation in Democratic South Africa. By Diana Gordon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Pp. 400. $75.00 cloth; $27.95 paper.

Transformation and Trouble: Crime, Justice, and Participation in Democratic South Africa. By Diana Gordon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Pp. 400. $75.00 cloth; $27.95 paper. Reviewed by Heinz Klug, University of Wisconsin Diana Gordon's book is an extraordinary treatment of one of most pressing issues facing a democratic South Africa-a high and seemingly uncontrollable level of crime. As Gordon demonstrates, post-apartheid wave is closely tied to South Africa's democratic transition and legacies of apartheid-socioeconomic and criminological. Her book ably presents histories of pre-apartheid and apartheid and traces bitter fruits this history has bequeathed new South Africa (pp. 83-110). At same time, Gordon does not simply blame structural violence of apartheid. Rather, book recognizes challenges facing democratic government while explaining and critiquing many of choices that have been made in repeated attempts to reduce rate in time since South Africa's first democratic election. While generally critical of government's efforts, particularly in its failure to embrace opportunities of public participation and accountability inherent in community policing, Gordon also highlights enormous changes that have taken place. First, police have been transformed from a paramilitary organization whose main purpose was to defend apartheid state into a more professional organization whose behavior has changed dramatically even if some of old ways of thinking about police work have been slow to change (pp. 140-8). Second, public order policing has, as a result of both policy change and professional leadership, been reoriented toward an understanding of role police must play in protecting public, including those who are exercising their constitutional rights to assemble and demonstrate, rather than merely defending political order of day (pp. 146-7). At same time, Gordon questions emphasis on a depoliticized professionalization, arguing that liberal promise of new constitution will only be achieved through a repoliticization that highlights role of police in protection of rights. One of most important contributions Gordon makes is her use of a comparative perspective to reflect on attempts to introduce what she terms public-empowering into South Africa's democratic transition. The idea of public-empowered justice reflects an engagement between public and official institutions that ties advocacy and service provision in a way that both empowers public participation and transforms the roles of criminal justice operatives to a community orientation(p. 196). Turning to South African experience, Gordon demonstrates continuing tension between various efforts to promote citizen participation in public ordering (p. 214) and reluctance of new government to provide adequate resources to ensure that these new mechanisms are not merely co-opted by police, a problem that she argues is exacerbated by degree of central control that new government has continued to assert in fields of criminal law and justice. Although Gordon recognizes that addressing broader problems of in South Africa will not be simply a matter of enhanced policing capacity or local control, she offers a stinging critique of new government's embrace of tough on crime politics that has come hand in glove with a neoliberal market orientation in government policies. …

Media proliferation and democratic transition in Africa: The case of Madagascar

Summary State-controlled media have historically dominated press outlets across much of Africa. Yet recently, economic and political liberalization, together with new communication technologies, have triggered rapid growth and increasing private sector involvement, changes which hold potentially important implications for development and governance. This paper explores the origins and impact of recent private sector media growth in Madagascar, where over 90 private radio stations and 15 private television stations have begun operation over the past decade. The resulting profusion of private media has played a key role in improving governance, most recently in the hotly contested presidential election of 2001.

Party Politics and Different Paths to Democratic Transitions

Benin and Senegal represent two successful cases of democratic transition in Africa. They also represent two different paths to that end. This article explores the role of political parties in facilitating these different and successful paths to democratic transitions. In Benin, political parties and political leaders relied on the prevailing patterns of ethno-regional cleavages to structure their strategic interactions, mobilize electoral support and organize competition in legislative and presidential elections. In Senegal, an incremental pattern of institutional reform helped the ruling party retain power while enabling fragmented opposition groups to participate in competitive elections. In the long run, this helped opposition groups develop an effective electoral coalition to defeat the ruling party in presidential and legislative elections and bring about a turnover in government.

Spaces of change: tribal authorities in the former KaNgwane homeland, South Africa

South Africa's democratic transition has had a significant impact upon localized governance systems in mediating development opportunities within the former apartheid homelands. This paper uses a case study from the former KaNgwane homeland to evaluate the role of the Matsamo Tribal Authority in shaping livelihoods and access to environmental resources. It is argued that although the colonial and apartheid empowerment of the tribal authorities continues to have symbolic and material meaning for rural populations, newly created democratic structures are challenging traditional governance systems in the post‐apartheid era. The intersection between these contrasting, and historically situated, systems suggests a dynamic renegotiation is occurring that will continue to impact rural households within the former places of apartheid.

Does Truth Lead to Reconciliation? Testing the Causal Assumptions of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Process

Throughout the world, truth commissions have been created under the assumption that getting people to understand the past will somehow contribute to reconciliation between those who were enemies under the ancien regime. In South Africa, the truth and reconciliation process is explicitly based on the hypothesis that knowledge of the past will lead to acceptance, tolerance, and reconciliation in the future. My purpose here is to test that hypothesis, based on data collected in a 2001 survey of over 3,700 South Africans. My most important finding is that those who accept the “truth” about the country's apartheid past are more likely to hold reconciled racial attitudes. Racial reconciliation also depends to a considerable degree on interracial contact, evidence that adds weight to the “contact hypothesis” investigated by western social scientists. Ultimately, these findings are hopeful for South Africa's democratic transition, since racial attitudes seem not to be intransigent.

South Africa's Democratisation and the Politics of Gay Liberation

When South Africa's final constitution was promulgated in 1996, it became the first in the world expressly to protect the rights of gay and lesbians. Since 1996, South African courts have decriminalised sodomy, ruled in favour of gay employees seeking benefits for partners, and supported immigration rights for foreign partners of gay South Africans. These gains are remarkable given the previously weak gay movement and the country's already crowded political and economic agenda in the wake of apartheid. This apparent tolerance also contrasts sharply with official homophobia and repression in neighbouring Zimbabwe and Namibia. This article argues that South Africa's democratic transition provided a political opportunity structure amenable to gay mobilisation. Secondly, the article examines how the gay liberation movement contributes to deepening South Africa's democratisation at a time when analysts are questioning the autonomy and strength of the country's civil society.

Soldiers in a storm: the armed forces in South Africa's democratic transition

Soldiers in a Storm: The Armed Forces in South Africa's Democratic Transition is a study of the role of the military in the creation and development of South Africa's new post-apartheid system. Philip Frankel asserts that the armed forces played a far greater role in the end of apartheid than is currently acknowledged in the literature, and that the relatively peaceful negotiations that ended apartheid would not have been possible without the participation of the South African National Defense Force and two major liberation armies.Frankel also examines the topics of military disengagement, civilianization, post-authoritarian political behavior on the part of militaries, and the process of democratic consolidation. He also discusses how many of these themes have been explored in the context of Latin America, and he points out that this is the only book that places these themes within the context of South Africa. This is an important case study with universal implications.

Negotiated transitions to democracy: Israel and the Palestinians as a case study

This article applies the Huntingtonian framework used by Jung and Shapiro to study South Africa's democratic transition to the Israeli‐Palestinian case. While leaders’ incentives pushed negotiators towards a highly inclusive constitutional order in South Africa, in the Israeli‐Palestinian case they pushed negotiators towards a highly exclusive order, crafted by means of a unique and bizarre but as yet unstudied electoral system. While the Palestinian entity may develop into a full‐fledged democracy in the long run, in the medium term it will not be truly democratic because political life affords no room for legitimate opposition. The findings suggest that transplacements in which the outgoing power does not plan to participate in the new political system may generally lead to highly exclusive political orders.

Promoting Human Rights and Democratic Transition in Africa

Direct and open external economic and diplomatic interference in domestic politics in the context of development co-operation is a rather new phenomenon, which started in the early 1990s. Its roots can be traced back to economic conditionality, generally known as structural adjustment on the one side and to the “velvet revolution” in Central and Eastern Europe on the other. Political conditionality constitutes a radical break with one of the central pillars of the post war international order: the rule of non-interference. On a normative level, it therefore demands a very careful weighing of state sovereignty against the defence of human rights and democracy. A reasonable case can be made in favour of intervention, however considering the results of political as well as economic conditionality in the past, we must also admit that we find very limited success. In the case of political conditionality it can even be argued that promoters of democracy have to consider carefully whether in some countries less interference is not more fruitful.