Intersectional citizenship,violence, and lesbian resistance in South Africa

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature on intersectionality and citizenship, with scholars positing a need to analyze multiple identities simultaneously in order to understand both the legal incorporation and embodied experience of citizenship for marginalized groups. Building upon this central insight, I contribute to this literature by articulating the components of an intersectional citizenship framework to better understand the way multiple identities mediate citizenship, with particular reference to black lesbians in South Africa. Based on in-depth interviews with eighteen members of the black lesbian organization Free Gender, in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, I argue that Free Gender’s organizational goals can usefully be understood as asserting the commensurability of the identity “black lesbian” with “community member,” “African,” and “woman.” In applying a theoretical framework of intersectional citizenship to South Africa, it becomes clear that Free Gender’s activism reveals differential access to identities necessary to be seen as citizens entitled to rights. More than just extending juridical citizenship, black lesbians must have socially and politically legitimate access to multiple identity categories simultaneously in order to live free of violence.     

Distance,services, and citizen perceptions of the state in rural Africa

In most poor countries, basic services in rural areas are less accessible and of lower quality than those in urban settings. In this article, we investigate the subnational geography of service delivery and its relationship with citizens' perceptions of their government by analyzing the relationship between service access, satisfaction with services and government, and the distance to urban centers for more than 21,000 survey respondents across 17 African countries. We confirm that access to services and service satisfaction suffer from a spatial gradient. However, distant citizens are less likely than their urban peers to translate service dissatisfaction into discontent with their government; distant citizens have more trust in government and more positive evaluations of both local and national officials. Our findings suggest that increasing responsiveness and accountability to citizens as a means of improving remote rural services may face more limits than promoters of democratic governance and citizen‐centered accountability presume.     

Learning about Democracy in Africa: Awareness, Performance, and Experience

Conventional views of African politics imply that Africans' political opinions are based either on enduring cultural values or their positions in the social structure. In contrast, we argue that Africans form attitudes to democracy based upon what they learn about what it is and does . This learning hypothesis is tested against competing cultural, institutional, and structural theories to explain citizens' demand for democracy (legitimation) and their perceived supply of democracy (institutionalization) with data from 12 Afrobarometer attitude surveys conducted between 1999 and 2001. A multilevel model that specifies and estimates the impacts of both individual- and national-level factors provides evidence of learning from three different sources. First, people learn about the content of democracy through cognitive awareness of public affairs. Second, people learn about the consequences of democracy through direct experience of the performance of governments and (to a lesser extent) the economy. Finally, people draw lessons about democracy from national political legacies.     

Drug laws,bioprospecting and the agricultural heritage of Cannabis in Africa

For centuries across most of Africa, farmers have valued Cannabis for multiple reasons. Historic crop selection produced genetic diversity that commercial bioprospectors value for marijuana production. African colonial and post-colonial administrations devalued the crop, enacted Cannabis controls earlier than most locations worldwide, and excluded Cannabis from agricultural development initiatives. Public agricultural institutions exclude Cannabis as an extension of drug-control policies. Only private companies conserve crop genetic diversity for psychoactive Cannabis, without recognizing intellectual property rights embedded in landraces. Cannabis decriminalization initiatives should stimulate evaluation of its roles in African agriculture, and of worldwide control and management of its genetic diversity.     

Aids, Policy and Politics: East Africa in Comparative Perspective

Policy analysis in developing country contexts poses special challenges. Very little is known about the policy process in these countries. Trying to rein the cultural, organizational and political factors that affect problem solving becomes an inductive search beyond the logic of conventional models of analysis. Using the AIDS issue as a case study, this article tries to throw light on the policy process in the three East African countries of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda with a view to highlighting the challenges of policy analysis in developing country contexts.     

Intelligence,Crisis, and Democracy: Institutional Punctuations in Brazil,Colombia, South Africa,and India

This article analyzes why institutional crises are bound to happen and how they impact on national intelligence systems’ development. Punctuated Equilibrium theory is reviewed and employed to explain one institutional crisis in each of Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, and India. In Brazil, the case study is the fall of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN) director in 2008, following the Satiagraha operation conducted by the Federal Police Department (DPF). In Colombia, the 2009 wiretapping scandal known as chuzadas is examined. In South Africa, the investigation in Project Avani (2006–8) is reviewed. Finally, in India the case study is the intelligence crisis following the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008. We found that institutional crises are inevitable because there are tensions between security and democracy, both being co-evolutionary dimensions of successful contemporary state building. However, the impacts of such crises vary across the four cases pending on three variables: (1) degree of functional specialization inside the national intelligence system; (2) degree of external public control over the national intelligence system; (3) whether effectiveness, legitimacy or both were the main drivers of the crisis. Our analysis of the four case studies suggests that the amount of positive institutional change in the aftermath of an intelligence crisis is greater in countries with more functional specialization and stronger external control mechanisms.