A “Bloody Epidemic”: Whiteness and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa

During the last years of the apartheid state, white South Africa was gripped by a so-called epidemic of family murder. This article examines the body of contemporary press responses to these killings to analyze the persistent assumption made by newspaper and magazine writers that the family murderer was necessarily white, male, Afrikaans, and conservative, and to think about what white family murder meant within the late apartheid imaginary. The explicit performativity of whiteness in South Africa, the injunctions attendant upon white privilege, and the difference between reactions to these deaths and the way in which “black-on-black violence” was conceptualized are combined to illustrate how the understanding of family murder as a primarily white phenomenon reflected South African modalities of race, most particularly of how the idea of whiteness operated in the late apartheid context and how it related to national understandings of violence.     

The undoing of a unique relationship? Peace and security in the EU–South Africa Strategic Partnership

ABSTRACT

When the European Union (EU) and South Africa acceded to a strategic partnership, they expanded into new areas of partnership. One of these areas was peace and security, which is the focus of this article. The article argues that, although there appears to be a shared understanding of what security means, the strategic partnership has not been utilised significantly to further this understanding in practice. This is largely due to the EU's preferences for a continental, multilateral approach over the bilateralism of a strategic partnership. At the same time, South Africa sees its strategic partnership with the EU as being outside of its broader commitment to regional security. As a result the peace and security element of the strategic partnership has not been leveraged effectively despite several entry points for action. The article thus concludes that both the EU and South Africa need to re-think the current arrangement.     

“Yours for Socialism”: Communist Cultural Discourse in Early Apartheid South Africa

This paper explores the diversity of cultural debates which constellated around the Communist Party in South Africa in the late segregationist and early apartheid periods. It traces the textual remains of an itinerant public debate––dispersed in periodical reviews, magazine articles, journalistic tit-bits and other ephemeral public sphere activities such as debating societies, theater groups and discussion clubs––with a view to complicating and expanding the South African literary-cultural archive. Of particular importance are the practices and protocols of reading, cultural critique and interpretation that characterized the intellectual-political field––or public sphere––which we name the Communist Party. In this way, a fragmented cultural discussion is provisionally reconstituted or “invented” as an important South African tradition and reclaimed as a significant intellectual inheritance. The project thus bears on broader question of reading the past and attempts to negotiate an historical split between uncritical nostalgia and the will to transcend.     

Brazil and South Africa: the ‘odd couple’ of the South Atlantic?

Exploring the complexity of South Africa's and Brazil's ‘like-mindedness’ at the regional, multilateral, and bilateral levels, this article argues that shared middle power roles traceable to the pre-Cold War era and beyond set the scene for a great deal of political complementarity and cooperation at the multilateral level where Brazil and South Africa's shared identities drive an interest in reforming global governance processes. This complementarity does not, however, always spill over to the bilateral level, where trans-societal linkages are still relatively limited compared with state-to-state interactions.     

Champions of the poor or “militant fighters for a better pay cheque”? Teacher unionism in Mexico and South Africa, 1979–2013

There are some fascinating historical parallels between Mexico’s giant teacher union, the Mexican National Education Union, and the South African Democratic Teachers Union. Although both teacher unions played an important role in challenging political oligarchies at certain points in their history, they became increasingly protectionist. Through their close affiliation to ruling parties, they were able to wield substantial political influence. In both of these cases, the unions played a controversial role in preventing central government surveillance and intervention in schools. Arguably, this often allowed not only for corruption in appointments and promotions, but also the protection of negligent teachers. There is some evidence to suggest that in protecting their sectional interests, both unions have frequently alienated parents and students at the community level. This paper addresses broader debates about the impact of powerful teacher unions on the quality of public schooling.     

“Zones of indistinction” and visions of post-reconciliation South Africa in District 9

In this article, I explore the ways in which District 9 reflects South Africa’s current socio-political transition through the problematical representation of the film’s eponymous slum and its impoverished inhabitants as well as its protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s influential ideas of biopolitics, I demonstrate the ways in which the film provides a compelling critique of the effects of neoliberal capitalism on post-apartheid transition and South Africa’s complex geopolitical landscape. In this regard, I analyze how the slum figures as a “zone of indistinction” where political and economic forces combine to produce the paradoxical conditions in which impoverished South Africans are included in a democratic social contract, but are simultaneously excluded from the socioeconomic benefits that it promises.     

The evolution of EU–South Africa relations: What influence on Africa?

South Africa and the European Union (EU) have a longstanding relationship. Their interaction has evolved through various phases, characterised simultaneously by ambitious partnerships coupled with a degree of wariness. As international dynamics change and Africa becomes an increasingly crucial player in global politics, the relationship between the EU and South Africa exerts a host of influences on how Africa and Europe relate to each other. This article discusses the evolution of EU–South Africa relations and highlights direct and indirect influences that this relationship has on the inter-regional partnership between Africa and Europe.     

The EU–South Africa Strategic Partnership: From bilateral to multilateral forums and the strategic value for South Africa

ABSTRACT

Strategic partnerships are seen as a means of elevating bilateral relations between two countries, or in the case of the European Union (EU), relations between an intergovernmental organisation and its 10 identified strategic partners. There is a growing body of analysis on the value of these strategic partnerships for the two partner states, yet just what role this partnership has within wider multilateral forums is an area for further discussion. This article explores the role that the EU–South Africa Strategic Partnership plays in shaping engagement between the bilateral partners in multilateral contexts. In reviewing the partnership over the course of its first decade, the article argues that South Africa has increasingly acknowledged its potential value. However, further interrogation on how to manage the complex intersection between bilateral and multilateral relations is called for if the strategic partnership is to be used to optimal effect as a tool of foreign policy.     

Unveiling the Third Force: Toward Transitional Justice in the USA and South Africa, 1973–1994

This study compares the American and South African security responses to perceived communist-inspired insurgencies—the American Indian Movement in the USA and the United Democratic Front/African National Congress in South Africa. In each instance, the governments employed third force techniques by utilizing surrogates, informants, provocateurs, and hit squads. As a result, these official entities became complicit in the criminal political violence that ravaged the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Rand townships between 1973 and 1994. This study also examines how investigative commissions in each country endeavored to expose official misconduct and hold these agencies accountable for their actions. Despite the differences in the scale of each insurgency as well as the overall purpose of each counterinsurgency campaign, this article finds common ground in the rationale, implementation, and effects of the security responses in each country.     

Economic,trade and development relations between South Africa and the European Union: The end of a strategic partnership? A South African perspective

ABSTRACT

The relationship between democratic South Africa and the European Union (EU) has been in existence for over 20 years, with its roots tracing back to anti-apartheid support measures. In its earlier form, it was anchored in the Reconstruction and Development Programme. Currently, it is guided by the National Development Plan of the National Planning Commission. This relationship has been tested over time, especially as a result of negotiations over the Economic Partnership Agreement with the EU. In the meantime, the euphoria that marked new South Africa's participation in the global system, with trade and development cooperation with the EU as one of the cornerstones, has waned considerably. The cancellation of several bilateral investment treaties with EU member states has further strained the relationship. While there are notable successes in the EU–South Africa Strategic Partnership, these may not be reflective of the actual strategic value of the partnership in the context of global shifts and the rising influence of emerging powers with which South Africa is integrating.     

Unrecognized states as a means of coercive diplomacy? Assessing the role of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Russia’s foreign policy in the South Caucasus

The scholarship on unrecognized or de facto states has been booming in the recent decades exploring this phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. Yet, as this article illustrates, a crucial accent on the instrumentalization of unrecognized states by regional actors – or, to put it differently, on unrecognized states as a source of coercive diplomacy – has been neglected. This article seeks to fill that gap by offering an empirical analysis of Russia’s instrumentalization of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as unrecognized states as a means of putting effective pressure on the Government in Tbilisi – usually with respect to issues unrelated to the unrecognized states themselves. More specifically, this article shows that Moscow has used three instruments (military deployment, passportization of residents of the unrecognized states and responsibility to protect).     

Deliberative democracy and the politics of traditional leadership in South Africa: A case of despotic domination or democratic deliberation?

A heated debate developed in South Africa as to the meaning of ‘deliberative democracy’. This debate is fanned by the claims of ‘traditional leaders’ that their ways of village-level deliberation and consensus-oriented decision-making are not only a superior process for the African continent as it evolves from pre-colonial tradition, but that it represents a form of democracy that is more authentic than the Western version. Proponents suggest that traditional ways of deliberation are making a come-back because imported Western models of democracy that focus on the state and state institutions miss the fact that in African societies state institutions are often seen as illegitimate or simply absent from people's daily lives. In other words, traditional leadership structures are more appropriate to African contexts than their Western rivals. Critics suggest that traditional leaders, far from being authentic democrats, are power-hungry patriarchs and authoritarians attempting to both re-invent their political, social and economic power (frequently acquired under colonial and apartheid rule) and re-assert their control over local-level resources at the expense of the larger community. In this view, the concept of deliberative democracy is being misused as a legitimating device for a politics of patriarchy and hierarchy, which is the opposite of the meaning of the term in the European and US sense. This article attempts to contextualise this debate and show how the efforts by traditional leaders to capture an intermediary position between rural populations and the state is fraught with conflicts and contradictions when it comes to forming a democratic state and society in post-apartheid South Africa.     

The Africanisation of Children's Rights in South Africa: Quo Vadis?

The article seeks to demonstrate how traditional African approaches to justice pervade the Child Justice Act 75 of 2008 (CJA) in ways that provide young offenders the possibility to have their dignity restored, by affording them an opportunity to take responsibility for their wrongful conduct. The article argues that this approach to justice underscores African values of Ubuntu and restorative justice in addressing offending in terms of the CJA. In the final analysis, the author argues that the successful implementation of these approaches will depend partly on how innovative officers in judicial proceedings are in using African models of justice, the values of the Constitution, and the lived experiences of children in conflict with the law.