“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.     

Identifying intentions: Latvian policy-makers’ perceptions of Russia’s intentions

There is much disagreement on the specific aspects of behavior that are the most useful for estimating intentions of potential adversaries. One view is that military capabilities are the most useful. Alternative views consider that an adversary’s domestic politics, or symbolic-normative aspects of its behavior, contain valuable information for assessing its intentions. This article tests these three competing views on Latvia as a case study, based on in-depth interviews with 10 high-ranking decision-makers. The article concludes that although the interviewees regarded information on the potential adversary’s military capabilities to be crucial for inferring its intentions, other indicators were also regarded as important.     

East Asia: Chile’s Missed Opportunity?

East Asia is regarded in Chile as an opportunity to achieve economic development, because economic integration would place it in East Asia’s value chains. This article suggests that the results of Chile’s economic strategy toward East Asia, based on trade agreements, have had a predominantly quantitative success. The value of exports toward East Asia has indeed increased impressively. However, the qualitative results are less impressive. These agreements are not adequate to achieve structural change, which would enable the Chilean economy to move along East Asia’s value chains. Statistical evidence confirms that Chile is still reduced to a commodity supplier and at the periphery of the chain. To change this situation, Chile has to design first a strategy of how to offer East Asia goods and services beyond commodities. This means looking beyond trade agreements.     

Exiting Capitalist Globalisation: Westra’s Unoist Approach

Published in 2015, Richard Westra’s Exit from Globalization employs a variation of Kozo Uno’s levels of analysis approach to the comprehension of economic life under capitalism and beyond. The approach has three elements. First, a dialectical pure theory that simultaneously exposes both the logic that capital and its impersonal society-wide competitive market employed in its largely successful attempt to regulate and reproduce material/substantive/real economic life and capital-labour relations during liberal capitalism and the economic norms that all historical societies must observe by whatever means so as to continue to reproduce material economic life. Second, a stages theory (mercantilism, liberalism and capitalist imperialism) of capitalism’s historical development. Finally, empirical studies of aspects of historical capitalism, informed by the pure and stages theories and a knowledge of general economic norms, may be conducted. Following Albritton, Westra advances a theory of a final fourth stage of capitalism that Uno, who died in 1977, never contemplated. He theorises the ongoing disintegration of consumerism and capitalism itself in the present era. In fleshing out a model advanced by Sekine, Westra theorises the functioning of a vibrantly democratic, partially relocalised eco-socialism.