“Like photographs of ghosts”: representing post-apartheid South Africa in Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) heard its first testimony in April of 1996. Two years later, in 1998, the first volume of the report of the commission was published. While it aims to be a document representing closure in terms of the history of apartheid, the TRC report is rife with gaps and omissions across the long history of apartheid. Approaching this history and its legacy in literary prose, Ivan Vladislavi?’s Double Negative (2010) serves as a counter-history to the TRC’s narrative of closure. Extending formal strategies from his earlier works, including composite literary form and performative modes of writing, Vladislavi? employs photography and ghosts within his text to unsettle official history and to offer a melancholic approach to the past of apartheid and its ongoing effects in post-apartheid South Africa.     

“A garden had been left to grow wild there”: considering nature in Ivan Vladislavić’s Johannesburg

Johannesburg has frequently been subjected to critical examinations that conceive the city as a metropolis dominated by late capitalist excess and gold mining hyperbole. Along these particular lines, much of the literary scholarship that considers Vladislavi?’s city texts have focussed on his conception of the built environment that critiques its exploitative extractive history and its simulacral tendencies. However, sustained critical attention of his treatment of nature in the urban space has largely been neglected or underplayed. The natural Highveld environment, for Vladislavi?, occupies a fraught and liminal space in the city, pushed to the margins of a brutalizing modernity. Nature in Johannesburg, he opines, is a construction, an imposition and inheritance that belies the city’s colonial and European settler history. However, there are moments in which, when human attention is turned away, nature in its untended and generative capacity works to unmake the structural obduracy of the settled city. This manifests in episodes that embrace the quiet potency of wild gardens that disrupt the urban status quo.     

Understanding Japan’s Peacebuilding in Concept and Practice

In the post–Cold War era, Japan has developed its own version of peacebuilding in concept and practice and has taken a non-coercive approach to peacebuilding. It has been underpinned by domestic norms of pacifism. This article elaborates on the underexplored theme of Japan’s peacebuilding by focussing on its conceptual basis and three key dimensions of practice. It aims at providing a refined understanding of the Japanese version of peacebuilding, which encompasses highly comprehensive activities in and beyond troubled regions, while carefully excluding the role of military coercion. This article first presents a brief overview of the term ‘peacebuilding’ understood internationally. It then examines Japan’s understanding of the concept of peacebuilding. It consists of the ‘consolidation of peace’ as an immediate contribution to peace and human security, and ‘state-building’ as establishing and enhancing political, economic and social frameworks for durable peace in the long run. The third section of this article investigates three important dimensions of Japan’s peacebuilding practice: (1) the on-the-ground effort in troubled regions consisting of non-military peacekeeping and the provision of foreign aid; (2) taking leadership in developing principles of, and approaches to, peacebuilding in international forums; and (3) human resource development for fostering civilian peacebuilders at home. Finally, this article concludes that Japan is carving out its niche in the field of peacebuilding, suggesting that it is constructing an identity as a peacebuilder.     

Japan’s Shifting Military Priorities: Counterbalancing China’s Rise

This article analyzes the most recent phase of Japan’s security policy reform, focusing on its shifting priorities towards the Japan Self-Defense Forces and the Japan–US alliance since mid-2010. From a realist perspective, it argues that these shifting military priorities first and foremost represent a traditional counterbalancing response to China’s rise. Conforming to the logic inherent in balance of threat theory, it moreover argues that this balancing behavior is explained by a confluence of two primary factors, namely Japanese perceptions of aggressive Chinese behavior in the maritime domain and concerns relating to the changing distribution of capabilities in China’s favor.     

Singapore’s 2015 General Election: Explaining PAP’s Resounding Win

Abstract

While Singapore’s 15th general election came about as expected, the ensuing results did not. In view of the opposition’s performance in the 2011 general election and the general sense that the ruling party had done well despite its performance being anything but sterling, the results were somewhat shocking. Even the leaders of the ruling party were caught by surprise at the party’s ability to garner 70% of the valid votes, 10% more than in the previous election. While many factors played a role, it was the opposition parties that lost the election rather than the ruling party that won it. Most of the opposition parties were rejected by the voters on grounds of not being worthy of support. The leading opposition party, the Workers’ Party, also suffered as many voters feared that it might perform too well to the detriment of the ruling party. In the end, the 2015 general elections strengthened the one-party-dominant state in Singapore and the quest for greater political representation was placed on the back burner.     

Introduction: Understanding Thailand’s Politics

ABSTRACT

Thailand’s politics from the mid-2000s has seen considerable conflict and contestation, with seven prime ministers, two military coups, and scores of deaths from political violence. This article, as well as introducing the eight articles in the Special Issue, examines various aspects of this tumultuous period and the authoritarian turn in Thai politics. It does this by examining some of the theoretical and conceptual analysis of Thailand's politics and critiquing the basic assumptions underlying the modernisation and hybrid regimes perspectives that have tended to dominate debates on democratisation. While the concepts of bureaucratic polity and network monarchy shed light on important political actors in Thailand, they have not grappled with the persistence of authoritarianism. In theoretical terms, the article suggests that it is necessary to understand historically specific capitalist development as well as the social underpinnings that establish authoritarian trajectories and reinforce the tenacity of authoritarianism.     

Pearson’s Mission: Revisiting Noel Pearson’s Revisionist History of Hope Vale

In 2000, Noel Pearson drew on his experiences of growing up on the Hope Vale, the Guugu Yimidhirr–speaking community that emerged from the Cape Bedford mission in the south east of Cape York, to write a revisionist history of the region. Indigenous communities were “strong, if bruised” in the wake of colonisation, he argued, but had descended into chaos since the 1970s because alcohol and welfare benefits had undermined the formerly resilient Aboriginal norms of “responsibility”. This paper offers a critical review of this politically potent account of the past, drawing on alternative oral histories, ethnographies and ethnohistories of Hope Vale, including Pearson’s own honours thesis (1986). Without challenging this sketch of his own experience, nor the sincerity of his nostalgia for the mission of his youth, I argue that Pearson’s more recent retellings are selective. In particular, his revisionist history overlooks evidence of drug abuse in the early colonial period and overstates both Guugu Yimidhirr agency in the process of missionisation and the uniformity and representativeness of the community that developed at Cape Bedford. Finally, I offer some possible personal, philosophical and political explanations for Pearson’s shifting approach to the past.     

Zimbabwe’s transition overload: an interpretation

ABSTRACT

The article argues that to understand the troubled history of Zimbabwe we have to pay attention to the multiple and incomplete ‘transitions’ that the country underwent within three decades. Each of these transitions was probably inevitable and the trajectory they followed may be the right one for each of the transitions. However, the transitions in Zimbabwe were intertwined in a not always mutually supportive way. Indeed, we also argue that eventually, Zimbabwe suffered from a ‘transition overload’ as the many transitions undermined or confounded each other. The article is also a caution against the preoccupation of individuals in Zimbabwean history. Finally, there are some lessons for post-conflict countries that are often faced with wide-ranging agenda that often include externally imposed items.     

Vietnam’s and China’s Diverging Industrial Relations Systems: Cases of Path Dependency

ABSTRACT

This article explains why Vietnam and China, one-party states that allow only one official trade union, are traversing different paths in their trade unions’ institutional structures, the state’s and trade union’s attitudes towards strikes, their willingness to allow independent trade unions and willingness to engage with the international labour union movement. These will be examined in terms of the path dependency of their recent histories, in which changes have been incremental on a path laid down by pre-existing entrenched institutions, until each national system no longer operated properly and new contingencies obliged the leadership to revamp the system. As a consequence of China’s and Vietnam’s divergent path dependencies, when external contingencies finally forced institutional change, countries have veered onto divergent trajectories – the Trans-Pacific Partnership energising Vietnam to debate the acceptance of autonomous trade unions, while Xi Jinping in China has intensified Party control over industrial relations.