Africa's Hosting Research Articles

The EU–South Africa Strategic Partnership and global environmental governance: Towards effective multilateralism after Copenhagen?

ABSTRACTThis paper uses an analytical framework drawn from organisational studies to unpack and evaluate climate change relations under the EU–South Africa Strategic Partnership. The article finds that, while the EU and South Africa share a common purpose and high-level climate goals, many of the formal organisational structures set up under the partnership to tackle climate change and the environment are weak and have fallen into disuse. At the same time several factors outside of the strategic partnership, such as South Africa's hosting of the Durban climate change meeting, have played a significant role in promoting climate cooperation between the two partners. Therefore, while the strategic partnership creates an additional opportunity for climate cooperation, it is by no means the only or even the most important instrument in the EU's foreign policy tool box for negotiation and dialogue.

Sentimentalizing Racial Reconciliation in the “New South Africa”: Cinematic Representation of the 1995 Rugby World Cup

In an age when the obsessive fixations on virtual reality scenarios and digital simulations of historical events have blurred the boundaries between truth and fiction, collective memory—and the authenticity it purports to maintain—come under threat of irrelevance if not outright extinction. As a distinctive kind of storytelling, filmmaking can be a powerful tool for promoting the collective remembrance of the past. Yet film is a notoriously slippery medium where questions of factual accuracy, objectivity, and truthfulness are concerned. Focusing attention on the Hollywood blockbuster film Invictus (2009) enables us to explore how feature films based on true stories produce modes of collective remembrance that have only tangential relationship to actual histories of real events. Directed by Clint Eastwood, and starring Morgan Freeman as President Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as Francois Pienaar, captain of South Africa's national rugby team, the Springboks, Invictus recounts the story of South Africa's hosting and winning of the 1995 World Rugby Cup, barely a year after the historic liberation elections of April 1994 brought an official end to white minority rule. The surprising, last-minute victory against the heavily favored Australian national team, the All Blacks, was a highly charged emotional moment in the contemporary history of the New South Africa, capturing the hope for racial reconciliation and the optimism that accompanied the rainbow vision of the future. Invictus fosters a distinctive kind of sentimentalized remembrance that requires a selective, partial engagement with the actual politics of the day and a caricatured understanding of race and racism in contemporary South Africa.

Along came a mega-event: prospects of competitiveness for a 2010 FIFA World Cup™ host city

South Africa's hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ came at a time when countries and cities worldwide were increasingly competing for this sought-after status. The benefits and challenges of such an event have received significant attention from researchers and practitioners alike. No tourism destination is guaranteed long-term competitiveness by being offered the once-off opportunity to host a major international event. This study aimed to determine whether a mega-event would make a greater or lesser contribution to the long-term competitiveness of the host destination given the extent to which it was being addressed at a strategic level. Existing literature on destination competitiveness and mega-events was studied to identify relevant issues that would have to be addressed at this level. Primary and secondary qualitative data were collected from a host city on the eve of the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ to place these issues into perspective. The empirical findings indicate how a mega-event can contribute to the competitiveness of a destination if it forms part of a broader event strategy; if the necessary leadership is in place; and stakeholder roles have been clarified.

The 2010 World Cup in South Africa: A Millennial Capitalist Moment

South Africa's hosting of the 2010 World Cup resulted in billions of Rand being spent on event-related infrastructure. Politicians and event organisers justified the spending as a necessary investment in the future of the country. The hosting of the 2010 World Cup was presented as a turning-point in the country's fortunes that would bring economic prosperity with it whilst helping to unite a once-divided nation. However, protests from workers' unions, civil society movements and victims of forced evictions testified to a different measure of the event's impact. To these parties, cheap Chinese imports and FIFA trading restrictions threatened any potential benefit to the South African economy, while forced evictions and poor living conditions focused attention on the alternative causes to which those resources could have been applied. This article seeks to analyse the arguments of both the proponents and protestors of the event using as its framework the concept of ‘Millennial Capitalism’ developed by Jean and John Comaroff. From this perspective the 2010 World Cup represented a national sacrifice of resources on infrastructure, tickets and trinkets in exchange for a momentary feeling of national unity and the realisation of economic prosperity for a select few, most of them outside South Africa. This article contributes to critiques of neo-liberal capitalism by illustrating how decisions to host mega-events demand sacrifice by all in order to reinforce the power and interests of a select and privileged group.

‘Our struggles are bigger than the World Cup’: civic activism, state‐society relations and the socio‐political legacies of the 2010 FIFA World Cup1

South Africa's hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup saw a large number of public demonstrations, strikes and other forms of civic campaigning. World Cup activism was both preceded and followed by extensive and intensifying public unrest and industrial action that in the period before the tournament, threatened to derail the event. This paper assesses the motivations, forms and implications of the activism during South Africa's staging of the FIFA finals and interprets them against the larger context of shifting state-society relations in the country. There are two purposes to the analysis. First, to explore the underlying internal social forces that gave shape to the protests at the time, and the possible influence of the exogenous politics of mega-event social mobilization. Second, the implications and outcomes of these dynamics for longer term socio-political processes in the country are considered. The activism displayed many of the features of the politics of contestation of sport mega-events today. Importantly, however, the activism stemmed from a particular systemic dynamic and reflected changing relations in the post-apartheid political community. Therefore, while the World Cup was used as a strategic opportunity by many advocacy groups, it was one that rather fleetingly and ambivalently presented an additional platform to such groups in an otherwise on-going set of political battles. Rather than a strong case study of sport's transformative capacity, the civic campaigning during South Africa's World Cup demonstrates the way a sport mega-event can be used as a strategic entry point by civil society groups in their engagement with the state, although this can occur with greater or lesser success.

Rural community perceptions of the 2010 FIFA World Cup: The Makhowe community in KwaZulu-Natal

More developing countries are now bidding for and hosting mega-events. However, it is unclear whether the legacies of a sport mega-event will benefit the host country's rural citizens. This is a particularly neglected area of research on mega-events. Rural communities in South Africa remain marginalised and often impoverished. This study assesses rural community members' perceptions of the costs and benefits of South Africa's hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. It looks at the impacts they anticipated and how they would like to have participated in and benefited from the event. The responses of 100 households in Makhowe in rural KwaZulu-Natal show that this community generally supported South Africa's hosting of the event and expected direct benefits. Both negative and positive experiences and legacies were anticipated. It is recommended that partnerships be leveraged with game parks to enhance opportunities for rural communities and that further research should be conducted.

Towards redefining the concept of legacy in relation to sport mega-events: Insights from the 2010 FIFA World Cup

Increasingly, governments from both the developed and developing world look to hosting sport mega-events as a way to stimulate development. There is much debate over what the legacies of sport mega-events are, how to stimulate positive legacies and how they should be studied. Drawing on a growing body of scholarship on legacy best and worst practice, this article discusses the economic, physical, infrastructural, social, political and environmental consequences of sport mega-events, using insights from South Africa's hosting of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. It examines pertinent debates, highlights prominent approaches to assessing legacy impacts, notes the lack of consensus on the meaning of ‘legacy’, and suggests steps towards a clear definition of the concept. These include the need to consider event impacts in relation to the context in which they occur, and to integrate triple bottom-line principles systematically into mega-event planning, design and evaluation.

Rethinking rugby and the rainbow nation

The Hollywood film Invictus tells the story of South Africa's hosting and winning of the World Rugby Cup in 1995 just months after the country's transition to democracy. It is a mythical moment in South Africa's contemporary history, capturing the hope and optimism that a brutally divided nation would come together and in doing so would be, as the title suggests, invincible. Central to the narrative is the game of rugby itself. Once emblematic of white supremacy, rugby becomes, in the film, the terrain upon which Nelson Mandela, the first president of the democratic era, cannily wages a battle to bring black and white South Africans together. This article offers a less triumphant reading of the 1995 World Cup, and in doing so argues that far from being indomitable, South Africa's democracy, much like the fortunes of its national rugby side, is fragile and precarious.

Glitz, Glamour and the Gautrain: Mega-Projects as Political Symbols

Gautrain, South Africa's first high-speed metropolitan transport network, is being developed at a cost of nearly R25 billion. It is being primarily justified on the basis of its close association with South Africa's hosting of the 2010 World Cup. However, the sheer scale of the costs involved, set against the larger and more pressing national transport shortages, invariably prompts questions about the rationale behind the construction of the Gautrain. Focusing on rational, cost–benefit considerations, and special interest groups on the one hand, and political symbolism on the other, the article concludes that political symbolism appears to be a major explanation for the construction of the Gautrain. As in many other aspiring developing economies, this mega-project serves to underscore the extent to which it projects South Africa as the pre-eminent modern African state.

Sport Mobility and Circuits of Power: The Dynamics of Football Migration in Africa and the 2010 World Cup

As a result of factors of globalisation and enhanced commercialisation, the migration of football professionals has become a very important facet of world football. West European leagues, where processes of commercialisation have been most robust in recent years, constitute the epicentre of international football migration, with these leagues attracting most of the world's athletic talent. Africa is a primary source for football flows to Western Europe, an aspect which is mostly viewed as exploitative and an extension of neo-imperialist relations between the continent and its former colonial powers. Over the past decade, however, South Africa has emerged as an important alternative destination for many of Africa's departing footballers. This article focuses on the nature and implications of this phenomenon. It explores the ways in which emergent tendencies of Africa to South Africa football movement correspond with or refract from Africa to Europe migration in terms of its underlying dynamics, and considers what possible effects South Africa's hosting of the 2010 football cup could have on an incipient form of sport mobility on the continent.

Political Analysis of South Africa's Hosting of the Rugby and Cricket World Cups: Lessons for the 2010 Football World Cup and Beyond?

This paper compares South Africa's hosting of two of the world's largest sporting events to date, the 1995 Rugby World Cup and the 2003 Cricket World Cup by doing a political analysis of these two mega-events and relating that analysis to South Africa's hosting of the 2010 Football World Cup. Although nations habitually put forward the tangible benefits that such events are likely to bring as justification for hosting them, not many analyses have sought to explore the processes through which the more elusive benefits are said to accrue, namely, identity formation and signalling aspects, on the one hand, and democracy and human rights enhancing aspects on the other. Through this analysis it is demonstrated how South Africa has traditionally drawn from the realm of politics using its perceived moral authority for hosting such events, yet the folding of the overtly political into the sporting arena has sometimes led to unintended consequences. South Africa has also become much more businesslike in its approach to sports events. Whereas the Rugby and Cricket World Cups were steeped in the symbolic importance of an ‘imagined community’, these sentiments are likely to become diluted in the face of a more consumerist global football milieu and the powerful role of FIFA in deciding who gets what, when and where.