Political culture,state elites and regional security in West Africa

This article analyses the dominant patterns of political culture among West Africa's state elites in an attempt to understand what standards, beliefs and principles they cherish. We suggest that although there are significant differences across the region's states, the dominant political culture can be characterised as neopatrimonial, that is, systems based on personalised structures of authority where patron–client relationships operate behind a façade of ostensibly rational state bureaucracy. In order to explore these issues the article proceeds in four parts. After providing a definition of political culture and why it is an important topic of analysis, we examine the central characteristics of the political culture held by state elites in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) region. The section ‘The Nigerian factor’ briefly discusses some of the malign effects that this culture has had upon governance and political economy issues in the regional giant, Nigeria. The final section explores whether the region's elites are living up to their own claims that they are embarking upon a serious attempt to engage in state reconstruction or are instead simply searching for alternative ways to sell their more traditional concern with regime protection. We conclude that, without a fundamental recasting of the political culture guiding the region's elites, a security culture that prioritises democracy and human security is unlikely to emerge within ECOWAS.     

Breaking boundaries,defying borders: transnational networks of gender and race in South Africa and the United States

Abstract

This special issue examines transnational connections and collaborations among women and People of Color from South Africa and the United States, from the late nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century: it considers how connections were fostered and how ideologies travelled. Key figures include Emily Hobhouse, Charlotte Maxeke, Cecilia Lilian Tshabalala, Maude White Katz, Madie Hall-Xuma, Elizabeth Mafeking, Miriam Makeba, Gloria Steinem, and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Actively and symbolically, each of these non-state actors approached the relationship between the two nations differently, through political and religious affiliations, and as individuals and through organizations. Many challenged and transcended the restrictions imposed upon them officially, through state-sanctioned segregation and apartheid, but also socially, on account of their gender. These women fostered intellectual and social connections with each other, as well as for their nations, through interpersonal relationships and in print, but also simply – and perhaps most problematically – through abstracted ideas about humanitarianism, motherhood, apartheid, and nation. Such travels and intellectual journeys could prove both mutually beneficial and hierarchically imbalanced, but nonetheless reiterate the continued transnational relevance and resonances between South Africa and the United States.     

Seducing the people: Populism and the challenge to democracy in South Africa

Recent ructions in South Africa's ruling African National Congress have been described from time to time in the media as signalling a dangerous shift towards ‘populism’. The article examines this contention. It argues that South Africa is witnessing a significant challenge to the founding precepts of constitutional democracy. This challenge emanates from the (populist) equation of democracy with ‘the will of the people’. The article unpacks some of the implications of reducing democracy to majoritarianism. It provides also an analysis of why populist appeals of various kinds have been so appealing to South African voters 15 years into democracy. The article argues that the challenges that are currently being experienced in relation to democratisation in South Africa have to do with the inherent tension between the animating ideology of democracy, which suggests that power resides with the people, and the practical functioning of democracy, which relies on the devolution of power to the representatives chosen by a section of the people who rely on order and predictability in the polity in order to govern in a workable way. Populist appeals, it is argued, exploit this tension. But what makes it possible for this strategy to succeed is the failure on the part of political elites to engage in the process of building democracy by way of inculcating respect for democratic values.     

Between transitional justice and politics: Reparations in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Reparations are a major component of transitional justice in the aftermath of widespread abuse. However, the implementation of reparations programmes often follows the logic of transitional politics, where short-term political interests trump victims’ rights. Using the South African case as a cautionary tale, this article shows that reparations are susceptible to political instrumentalisation and evaluates the role of international redress norms in safeguarding victims’ rights. Civil society groups have used the right to reparations as a basis for political contestation of inadequate reparations programmes and focused primarily on the broadening of redress norms. However, the existing international legislation fails to protect victims’ rights to reparations from political manoeuvring. In conclusion, the article highlights the need for international redress norms to be consolidated and made more concrete in order to more effectively circumscribe the scope states have to avoid meeting their reparations obligations.     

Party systems in Africa: Problems of categorising and explaining party systems

Starting from controversial findings about the relationship between party systems and the prospects of democratic consolidation, this article argues that problems can only be properly addressed on the basis of a differentiated typology of party systems. Contradictory research results do not pose an ‘African puzzle’ but can be explained by different and inadequate approaches. We argue that a modified version of Sartori's typology of party systems provides an appropriate method for classifying African party systems. Based on Sartori's framework, a preponderance of predominant and dominant party systems is identified. This can be explained partly by the prevailing authoritarian nature of many multiparty regimes in Africa but not by electoral systems or the ethnic plurality of African societies. All kinds of electoral systems are connected to dominant party systems. High ethnic fragmentation does not automatically produce highly fragmented party systems. This phenomenon can be attributed to the ‘ethnic congress party’ that is based on an ethnic elite coalition.     

Production networks,economic integration and the services sector: Implications for regional trade agreements in southern Africa

Debate on an appropriate framework for economic integration in southern Africa has hitherto focused largely on matters relating to trade in final goods, with little analysis of the potential benefits of production sharing and fragmented trade, or of challenges related to the accompanying role of the services sector. The first goal of this article is thus to explore the possible benefits for the development of specialisation and trade expansion related to the international fragmentation of production, and whether such benefits may be better harnessed by southern African countries in a context of regional integration. Secondly, the critical role of the services sector in production-sharing arrangements leads to questions about developing country services sectors and regional versus multilateral services liberalisation. The article therefore considers the importance of the services sector in the fragmentation context, and the growing debates surrounding services aspects of developing country regional trade agreements. It is argued that while there may be a case for the promotion of production-sharing arrangements in regional trade agreements in southern Africa, key constraints that continue to hinder the region's trade and development agenda remain the conflicting rules of origin in economic arrangements with overlapping membership, and non-tariff barriers to trade, particularly intra-regional transport costs.     

Political opposition and the challenges of a dominant party system: The democratic alliance in South Africa

The African National Congress enjoys a position of leviathan-like dominance in South Africa. In official opposition stands the Democratic Alliance whose support has risen considerably since South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994. The white electorate strongly favours the party over its main rival, the Freedom Front Plus. The coloured community in the Western Cape has also given the Democratic Alliance its support. Although the party has done well in attracting the support of ethnic minority groups it has not been so successful among the African electorate. In accounting for the success of the Democratic Alliance this article considers three themes: firstly, the reasons why white voters, especially Afrikaners, shifted their support to the party; secondly, the brand of South African patriotism now used by the party to promote the primacy of a non-racial South African identity; and finally, the party's understanding of political opposition and the obstacles that exist to it making further electoral progress.     

Counter-trafficking governance in South Africa: an analysis of the role of the KwaZulu-Natal human trafficking,prostitution, pornography and brothels task team

Determining the efficacy of available counter-trafficking strategies is just as important as understanding the phenomenon of human trafficking itself. This is so if anti-trafficking practitioners wish to make in-roads in preventing and combating human trafficking in South Africa. At the heart of the matter are the ways in which counter-trafficking governance is structured in the South African context. In this article we use the KwaZulu-Natal intersectoral task team, an un-resourced agency of provincial government mandated to prevent and combat human trafficking, as a case study to analyse the ‘4P model’ of counter-trafficking favoured in South Africa. We find that while such an integrated model has great potential, issues of institutional cooperation and coordination, pervasive public official corruption and budgetary constraints hamper its current impact and efficacy. We conclude that these issues must be addressed by South African policy-makers once legislation has been promulgated.     

Covid-19 Pandemic,Social Mitigation and Taxation: The Open Veins of Inequality in Latin America

The pandemic of Covid-19 has exposed the veins of inequality in Latin America. With a socioeconomic disaster looming, social emergency policies seemed inevitable. Yet while governments argue over the continuity of such policies and whether the fiscal rules in place should be respected, no sustainable response has come out. This essay problematises whether the pandemic could represent a critical juncture to forge ahead with political narratives that highlight tax exemptions and privileges enjoyed by the rich. We analyse the mitigation measures adopted by Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay and their repercussions on the debate surrounding progressive tax reforms to fund social schemes.     

Tears,Trauma and Suicide: Everyday Violence among Street Youth in Puebla,Mexico1

Despite considerable ethnographic research with young people in street situations and a growing interest in violence, little attention has been paid to suicide. The occurrence of suicide is a dramatic event that reveals weaknesses in support systems established by governments and civil society organisations, as well as perceived failings of friends. While an interest in suicide usually considers cause, in this paper we explore effect. How does the death of a member of a tightly knit group of street youth affect others and what does the suicide tell us about their identification with death more generally? Research for the paper was part of an in‐depth study of identities among street youth in Mexico.     

In search of real justice for Africa and Africans,and her/their descendants in a world of justice,injustices and impunity

Abstract

The quest for justice by Africans and peoples of African descent, wherever they may be in the world, is arguably one of the most daunting mental, psychological, moral, legal and material challenges facing humanity in general, and the peoples of Africa in particular. It is a question of whether African peoples demand justice for the wrongs committed against Africa and its peoples over the last 500 years, or whether Africa and African peoples accept complicity in the global impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators of those injustices, and by doing so diminish the significance of contemporary enthusiasm for global justice. Centralising the question of impunity to date for horrendous crimes, gross human and peoples’ rights violations and other injustices against Africa and Africans is not meant to distract Africans in Africa and the diaspora from the quest, in the 21^st century, for a new Africa that we have a historical responsibility to build and, by doing so, to ensure that the past is not repeated. Acknowledging the wrongs of the past and making symbolic reparative actions for those wrongs are essential for ensuring that the pursuit for a better world of justice is not built on top of underlying sinkholes and on the waste dumps of past injustices. Critical breakthroughs, such as the commitment enshrined in the Constitutive Act of the African Union (2000), on crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide and the prohibition of unconstitutional change of government, must be vigorously pursued to their logical conclusion. To do so requires an understanding of where Africans, in their relationship with peoples in the rest of the world, are coming from. Smaller parts of the world have experienced similar heinous injustices with impunity, and Africa's pursuit of real justice also applies to those states and their peoples. Corrective or reparative justice is needed to clear the path for the meaningful and honest promotion of real global justice in the making of the future. It is imperative that the making of the African Renaissance confront real global justice for the sake of the past, the present and the future.     

The logic of competitive influence-seeking: Russia,Ukraine, and the conflict in Donbas

The crisis in Ukraine since late 2013 has seen four successive internationally mediated agreements that have been at best partially implemented. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and 42 key informant interviews sides, we explain this outcome with reference to the logic of competitive influence-seeking: Russia is currently unable to achieve a friendly and stable regime in Kyiv and thus hedges against the consolidation of an unfriendly pro-Western and stable regime by maintaining its control over parts of eastern Ukraine and solidifying the dependence of local regimes there on Russian support. This gives Russia the opportunity to maintain the current status quo or settle for re-integration terms through which Russia can sustain long-term influence over Ukraine’s domestic and foreign policy. We conclude by reflecting on the consequences of competitive influence-seeking in the post-Soviet space: the likely persistence of low-intensity conflict in Ukraine; the further consolidation of territorial divisions in other post-Soviet conflicts; and the need for policy-makers in Russia and the West to prioritize the management of the consequent instability.     

Traditional institutions and the rural development challenges in Africa: Gender and agricultural transformation perspectives

Abstract

The tension between the conception of traditional leadership systems as mere cultural institutions and the lack of interest and/or ability to use them as practical development tools in Africa has prompted their critical reappraisal in this article. The article is based on the need for African countries to endeavour to achieve a dialectical mediation between traditional leadership institutions on the one hand and concrete rural development projects on the other, for the purpose of promoting sustainable development. It is argued that there is much that traditional institutions can do to influence activities in rural areas. Any lack of such involvement on the part of traditional leadership systems can only lead to little transformation in rural areas. The article discusses this position with reference to two rural activity systems related to gender-based issues and agricultural development. The article is structured in four parts. The first section is devoted to the introduction, the second and third sections examine the roles traditional leaders could play in the areas of gender and agricultural development, while the final section comprises the conclusion.     

In Search of Alternatives: The Making of Grassroots Politics and Power in Argentina

This article analyses ethnographically the reconfigurations of the state and relations of power through their dynamic interactions with subaltern alternatives that emerged in the 2001 uprising in Argentina. In this regard, it counters influential interpretations of these events articulated within John Holloway’s framework of ‘anti‐power’, which ignores the reconstruction of the state, and rank and file trade unionism. The article concludes that intensified class and political struggles in the region offer new spaces for contesting hegemonic reinventions of populism and ‘top‐down’ socialism in Latin America.     

Ghosts in the Shell: On South Africa,the USA and Japan

This article surveys American literary responses to the rise of Japan as an economic power during the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, and examines how these responses were anticipated in the writings of the South African author Laurens van der Post. Paying particular attention to van der Post’s autobiography, Yet Being Someone Other (1982), I suggest that the author’s formative experiences aboard a Japanese trading vessel in 1926, coupled with South Africa’s close-knit trading relationship with Japan in the 1980s, enabled a perspective on Japan’s economic ascendancy that was markedly less reactionary than those in the USA. By emphasizing the historical contexts that held true at the time of publication, I situate Yet Being Someone Other in a framework that deliberately circumvents—without necessarily confronting—van der Post’s preferred version of his life story. Rather than “recovering” the author’s ‘place in the canon of South African literature, this article is intended to incorporate the author’s work into ongoing discussions of the representation of Japan and the Japanese in twentieth-century Anglophone writings.     

From la guerra sucia to ‘A Gentleman’s Fight’: War,Disappearance and Nation in the 1976–1983 Argentine Dictatorship

Analysing the last Argentine dictatorship in the light of contemporary re‐examinations of war, this article argues that the 1976–1983 dictatorship can be understood as a shift in war(s), from la guerra sucia to the Falklands/Malvinas conflict, from a limitless and unsustainable internal war to a bracketed external war. That external war is shown to be an attempt to re‐found a nation imploding through disappearance. Drawing on the history of disappearance in Argentina reveals that, despite obvious differences, there are many continuities between the dictatorship and other regimes, emphasising the dangers of a politics that encourages a nation ‘re‐malvinizada’.     

Official Language Policies in Multilingual Societies: Evidence from the United States,South Africa,and Canada

This paper explores the resonance between Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands and McCarthy’s fifth novel Blood Meridian through a discussion of how scenes of violence are represented and rationalised in these two texts. Where Coetzee is impatient of realism and preoccupied with history as a discourse, McCarthy’s narrative seems photorealistic in its evocation of the real, but this effect is destabilised by stylised formal features and the trickster figure of Judge Holden. It is shown that in Coetzee’s egocentric protagonists the desire for detached power over others is expressed in the fantasy of an unchallenged gaze that conveys a broader anxiety about authorship and the writing of history, while in McCarthy’s text the narrator’s contextualisation of the characters’ violence against a harsh and indifferent desert environment limits psychological insight and underscores the impernanence of any historical record. Holden and Jacobus Coetzee, finally, are shown to be akin in enabling the metafictional reflections of these two novels.     

Contested Discourse,Contested Power: Nationalism and the Left in Paraguay

Nationalism has been a key, but generally overlooked, component of twentieth‐century Paraguayan politics and an important explanatory factor in the country’s political outcomes. Indeed, it has been central to the struggle for political power, most significantly to the continuing hegemony of the Colorado Party. This article traces the development of the Paraguayan Left, highlighting its structural and functional weaknesses, and analyses its relationship with nationalism, in particular with the dominant Colorado nationalist discourse. It argues that an important failure of the Left – and indeed other political parties and movements – has been its inability to produce a successful challenge to this hegemonic discourse.