From a ‘terrorist’ to global icon: a critical decolonial ethical tribute to Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela of South Africa

This article examines Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela’s political life and legacy from the perspective of critical decolonial liberation ethics, which privileges a paradigm of peace, humanism and racial harmony and opposes the imperial/colonial/apartheid paradigm of war, racial hatred and separation of races. This system emerged in the 15th century and was driven by the desire to conquer, dispossess, colonise, exploit and segregate people according to race and, alongside imperatives of primitive accumulation, it informed the colonisation of South Africa and the imposition of apartheid. Mandela was a liberation fighter who provided an antidote to the colonial ideology of racial profiling and hierarchisation. What distinguished him from other freedom fighters was his commitment to the cause of human rights as early as the 1960s, long before it attained its status as a constitutive part of global normative order. When Mandela became the first black president of a democratic South Africa, his practical and symbolic overtures to whites and his reconciliatory politics aimed to call them back to a new inclusive humanity. Critical decolonial ethics logically enables a tribute to Mandela that privileges his commitment to a post-racial society and new humanism.     

Rebellion in Gojam Province,Ethiopia

This article explores how and why the church in South Africa became an important civil society space and actor at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle and yet its civil society role declined following the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) and the release of political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela. It does this by engaging in a discussion of the nature of the South African church as civil society, followed by a consideration of the church's role at various points during the democratic transition. Specifically, it explores the church as a “site of struggle” during the late stages of the anti-apartheid struggle, as engaging in mediation and negotiation during the democratic transition, and as returning to a predominantly religious organisation in the post-apartheid era. It concludes with a discussion of the reasons for and implications of the church's decreased role in public and political life following the transition from apartheid to non-racial democracy.     

The Potency of the State: Logics of Informality and Subalternity

Abstract

This article serves as an epilogue to the special issue curated by Claire Bénit-Gbaffou and Sarah Charlton with a focus on state power and the concept of informality. In my reflection, I examine the specificity of statecraft in the context of postcolonial government. In particular, I analyse political potency as a relationship between the state and subaltern subjects. Also at stake in this paper is the question of comparative and transnational analysis. In what ways can concepts generated through the study of processes of urban informality in India speak to the production of illegality and the reproduction of rule in South Africa?     

Introduction: rising powers and the future of global governance

There has been much debate over the extent to which the rising powers of the global South are challenging contemporary global political and economic governance. While some observers see an emancipatory potential in the redistribution of power among states, others see the rising powers as firmly located within the Western-centred neoliberal world order. This collection of papers seeks to go beyond the state-centrism of existing approaches by examining how challenges to global governance by rising powers are rooted in specific state–society configurations. Through studies of Brazil, India, China and other important developing countries within their respective regions, such as Turkey and South Africa, the papers examine the way domestic structures, arrangements, actors and dynamics influence the nature of the international interventions and behaviour of rising powers. They ask how their increased political and economic enmeshment in the international system impacts upon their own internal societal cohesion and development. By examining these issues, the papers raise the question of whether the challenge posed by the rising powers to global governance is likely to lead to an increase in democracy and social justice for the majority of the world’s peoples.     

Nelson Mandela: the ripple effect

This article considers how Nelson Mandela’s immediate family members intellectualised themselves within his legacy when he was terminal and upon his death. These specifics sublimate and set him apart from the eulogising tendency such as it has energised the scholarship on him. The tactics highlight tradition as an analytical category. Citing succession as a key episteme, the discussion delineates how tradition rarefies in non-hegemonic, mobile and fragile subject positions. In this approach, the paper invokes subtleties in the African Customary Law of Succession in South Africa.     

Is Turkey coming to terms with its past? Politics of memory and majoritarian conservatism

There is unprecedented domestic and international interest in Turkey's political past, accompanied by a societal demand for truth and justice in addressing past human rights violations. This article poses the question: Is Turkey coming to terms with its past? Drawing upon the literature on nationalism, identity, and collective memory, I argue that the Turkish state has recently taken steps to acknowledge and redress some of the past human rights violations. However, these limited and strategic acts of acknowledgment fall short of initiating a more comprehensive process of addressing past wrongs. The emergence of the Justice and Development Party as a dominant political force brings along the possibility that the discarded Kemalist memory framework will be replaced by what I call majoritarian conservatism, a new government-sanctioned shared memory that promotes uncritical and conservative-nationalist interpretations of the past that have popular appeal, while enforcing silence on critical historiographies that challenge this hegemonic memory and identity project. Nonetheless, majoritarian conservatism will probably fail to assert state control over memory and history, even under a dominant government, as unofficial memory initiatives unsettle the hegemonic appropriation of the past.     

Endemic violence in south africa: An od solution applied to two educational settings

This article discusses the endemic nature of violence in South Africa. The authors hypothesize that the culture in South Africa is autocratic in nature. They compare the socialization that occurs between democratic and autocratic families and the relationship this has to later problem-solving and conflict resolution behavior. People raised in an authoritarian culture need to develop skills that will enable them to learn an alternative to violence in conflict and problem-solving situations. The authors describe two educational interventions that followed this model. Available results are presented.

Both historically and today, violence in South Africa is endemic. Examples of South Africans committing violent acts because they feel justified fill today's media. Despite hopes and visions for a new South Africa and examples of goodwill and peaceful common ground between the different political positions, these violent acts emanate from all points of the political compass. Historically, we find examples such as the black tribal wars -- the African/Zulu wars, the Zulu/British wars, and the Anglo/Boer Wars.^(1),(2)

Although some positive processes of change occur in the country, a violent approach to problem-solving still remains. It is evident, both through research and perception, that all major population clusters (including whites, Africans, and other populations in South Africa) are predominantly authoritarian by virtue of their origin, their education, and their creed. This authoritarian culture may contribute toward the resistance against democratic processes and possibly heighten the opportunity for violence. The birth of liberation amplifies this dynamic situation. For all parties involved, liberation heightens the “fear for loss”⁽³⁾ and creates a non-productive power struggle. In this paper, we first explore why we believe that violence is endemic in this country, showing how an authoritarian culture may contribute to this problem. Second, we will describe two OD interventions presented in separate educational settings that were designed to reduce violence.     

The Political Economy of Institutions,Stability and Investment: A Simultaneous Equation Approach in an Emerging Economy. The Case of South Africa

The modern theory of investment identifies the importance of uncertainty to investment. A number of empirical studies have tested the theory on South African time series, employing political instability measures as proxies for uncertainty. This paper verifies that political instability measures are required in the formulation of the investment function for South Africa. It also establishes that there are distinct institutional factors that influence the uncertainty variable such as property rights and crime levels. We find that rising income and property rights lower political instability, and that rising crime levels are positively related to political instability. The inference is that political instability in South Africa may not represent uncertainty directly, since it is systematically related to a set of determinants. Instead, uncertainty would have to be understood as being related to a broader institutional nexus that in concert may generate uncertainty for investors. The paper highlights the significance of getting institutions right to ensure that uncertainty is kept to a minimum by providing a predictable long-term environment. Stability at a systemic level appears crucial if investment rates are to rise in South Africa and this paper demonstrates that stability in turn is driven by a sound institutional environment that has multiple dimensions.     

Issues of justice and reconciliation in complex political emergencies: Conceptualising reconciliation,justice and peace

This paper focuses on what can be done during emergency and transition periods to promote sustainable peace, in the aftermath of complex political emergencies in Africa, with particular reference to issues of reconciliation and justice. There is no common understanding of the political conditions under which efforts at reconciliation should be minimal in relation to a focus on justice in order to achieve the 'best' peace, or of those where the pursuit of justice should become paramount. There is also not even a common language of what justice and reconciliation mean in the context of post-conflict peace-building. The paper concludes that there is a much greater potential role for outsiders with regard to justice, while reconciliation is considered to be more of an internal affair in which international actors can only be present as supporters of domestic initiatives, and even then with great caution.     

The hares,the hounds and the African National Congress: on joining the Third World in post-apartheid South Africa

The utility of framing questions of global inequality in relation to a ‘First World’ and a ‘Third World’, a North and a South, or developed countries and developing (or underdeveloped) countries, has been much debated since the end of the Cold War. This article addresses the issue of the perceived weaknesses and possible continued strengths of the notion of the ‘Third World’ in general terms, and then grounds such a discussion through an analysis of the way that the African National Congress (anc) government in post-apartheid South Africa has approached the question of global inequality. Since its election in 1994, and more particularly since Thabo Mbeki succeeded Nelson Mandela as president, the anc has presented itself as having an especially important leadership role on behalf of the Third World. The profound contradictions inherent in the anc's effort both to retain its Third Worldist credentials and to present itself as a reliable client to the Bretton Woods institutions and foreign investors provides insights into how to design alternative strategies for overcoming world-wide poverty, strategies which might be more effective than those chosen by the anc. Since the anc was elected to government in 1994 it has pursued a brand of deeply compromised quasi-reformism, analysed here, that serves primarily to deflect consideration away from the options presented by other, much more meaningfully radical international and South African labour organisations, environmental groups and social movements. At the present juncture a range of increasingly well-organised grassroots movements in South Africa find that they have no choice but to mobilise in active resistance to the bankrupt policies of the anc. The increasing significance of these efforts points to the possibility that they might eventually be able to push South Africa—either through a transformation of the anc itself or through the creation of some new, potentially hegemonic, political project in that country—back into the ranks of those governments and groups that seek to use innovative and appropriately revolutionary approaches to challenge the geographical, racial and class-based hierarchies of global inequality.     

South Africa in a comparative study of industrialization

The peculiarities of South African society, where class, ethnic, linguistic and national cleavages overlap, tend to obscure the process which have led to industrialization. This is unfortunate because a study of South African social structures may shed light on the wider problems of development. An attempt is made in the article to compare political and economic developments in South Africa with similar developments in Tsarist Russia, Imperial Germany and the American South. It is suggested, for example, that the German ‘marriage of iron and rye’ has a counterpart in the relationship between maize and gold in South Africa and that similar political consequences follow. The organization of the South African mining compound is considered, in its formulating effect upon the peculiar process of urbanization in South Africa. This particular form of urbanization has resulted in the creation of a very considerable surplus for investment, the implications of which are discussed.     

Orientalism and African Development Studies: the ‘reductive repetition’ motif in theories of African underdevelopment

Contemporary Africa is generally depicted as a ‘failure’. ‘Progress' has eluded the continent throughout the 20th century, and despite new ways of thinking about the reasons for failure and possibilities for success, allusions to the ‘natural weakness and incapacity’ of Africans and their social realities remain evident in theoretical, policy and political discourse on development in Africa. The practice of ‘reductive repetition’, as identified by Abdallah Laroui and Edward Said, has been imported into African development studies from Orientalist scholarship. Reductive repetition reduces the diversity of African historical experiences and trajectories, sociocultural contexts and political situations into a set of core deficiencies for which externally generated ‘solutions’ must be devised. In the field of development studies, the notion of development is introduced to Africa as a deus ex machina. In this article modern conceptualisations of development are challenged in three steps. First, it traces the history of development discourse over the post-Berlin Conference colonial and post-WWII development eras, suggesting that, while rhetoric of racial and cultural inferiority has been transformed, the notion of African deficiency remains at the conceptual and discursive levels. Second, the primarily liberal idea that ‘development for all’ is possible is challenged as being an ecological and economic, and therefore also social, impossibility. Third, given the problems of growth-based development, the article suggests that modern development theory ought to give way to post-developmental thinking which challenges standard a priori assumptions regarding rationality, linearity and modernity, thus offering some modest hope for a move ‘beyond’ the current development impasse.     

Who governs? Religion and order in postcolonial Africa

Abstract

This article explores how mutually productive intersections between religion and governance constitute international political order in sub-Saharan settings. Asking ‘who governs’, I propose religion–governance entanglement as a means of analysing these intersections and rethinking governance, order and religion in Africa. Existing literatures typically characterise the public reliance on religious actors and institutions as being part of a uniquely ‘post-secular’ moment in contemporary world politics or a wider ‘post-Westphalian’ shift in modern governance. Enduring dynamics between postcolonial states and the Global North problematise these framings. In sub-Saharan Africa, religion has a protracted history in postcolonial hybrid governance, overlapping the regional presence of international non-govermental organisations following decolonisation. Using the example of South Sudan, I build on recent analyses of religious-political activities that leave their collective implications under-theorised.     

Democratization of the State: A Global Perspective and South African Case Study

ABSTRACT

This essay provides a global perspective on the democratic transformation of the state in societies undergoing democratization. Comparative research indicates that the development and effective performance of democratic political systems require the establishment of honest and competent public bureaucracies that avoid political partisanship and demonstrate respect for the diverse values and interests of the populations they serve. Especially important in democratizing the state is the development and practice of the norms of secondary democracy. The practice of these norms of mutual respect, fairness, and collaboration create the essential culture or modus vivendi of democracy. The Republic of South Africa is analyzed as an important case study of a contemporary state that is attempting to create a democratic and corruption-free public service in a country with an extremely racist, authoritarian, and corruption-ridden past. This case study reveals that the democratization of the state in South Africa, as in the case of other countries around the world, requires the members of the state bureaucracy to practice the norms of secondary democracy in their daily relations with one another and in their relations with the citizenry.     

A practical model for the management of resistance to change: An analysis of political resistance in South Africa

Change is usually accompanied by resistance -- a neglected and not well understood facet of applied O.D. and large social system change efforts. The management of resistance, just as the rest of the change intervention, should be a planned, systematic, continuous and actively managed process.

The model described in this paper supplies an approach to actively manage resistance according to a systematic and methodological plan. In South Africa this model has been used for two purposes: as a practical management strategy for dealing with resistance during O.D.-projects in business, industry and also in other social settings; and for purposes such as research and as a framework to come to grips with resistance of political parties and other interes groups in these times of major political and social changes. This model is explained and then applied to analyse the resistance of various groups to political changes in South Africa.     

The Historical Origins of Tanzania's Ruling Class

This article integrates the dynamics within authoritarian elites into analysis of democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa. This variable has been excluded from nearly all analysis on the subject. Based on a comparison of three cases, this article concludes that only in cases where popular mobilization was accompanied by deep divisions within the ruling coalition did democratization ensue. The division of the authoritarian coalition in Benin and South Africa created a window of opportunity which enabled pro-democracy forces to push through democratic reforms. Furthermore, only when a majority of the authoritarian elite in South Africa favoured negotiations with the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid political organizations did the transition towards democracy in South Africa make any progress. In contrast, in the Togolese case, a united ruling coalition precluded any reform that would have challenged its political hegemony.     

The past or the politics of the present? Dealing with the Japanese occupation of South Korea

Why do historical legacies continue to burden politics in East Asia? According to major schools of thought on collective memory, perceptions of historical injustice may be determined by the past (traditionalism), the present (presentism) or the interplay of both. This paper assesses the validity of these theories by examining the effect of transitional justice on perceptions of wrongdoers. Transitional justice offers a unique substrate for exploring competing theories of collective memory as it represents a contemporary process for dealing with the past. Were transitional justice to transform perceptions of wrongdoers, it would provide evidence supporting presentism. This hypothesis was tested using a survey of 640 adults from the Gallup Korea online panel. South Korea was selected as a research site because the legacy of Japan's occupation remains unresolved. A Tobit analysis supported presentist approaches although, as traditionalists claim, perceptions of wrongdoers were resistant to change. The organic nature of collective memory suggests that perceptions can only be transformed by comprehensive transitional justice.     

Overcoming the division bloc and its limitations: a Gramscian approach to South Korean social formation

Abstract

Colonialism affects post-colonial social formations in a variety of ways. Japanese colonial rule had a far-reaching influence on South Korean post-colonial social formation. Most legacies of colonialism diminished as time went by, but one legacy of colonialism continued or even increased its effects on the South Korean political economy from the 1960s – namely, the division of Korea. This article provides an alternative Gramscian approach to the analysis of the social formation of South Korea, with due consideration of the division of the peninsula. For that purpose, it introduces the concept of a division bloc, adapting Gramsci’s concept of a historical bloc to develop an analysis of a social formation that is unique to South Korea. Then, I explicate the two events that have been most damaging for the division bloc – the 1997 economic crisis and the 1998–2007 inter-Korean reconciliation – describing them as an organic crisis and a hegemonic project, respectively. Following this, I present reasons why the counter-hegemonic efforts of liberal nationalists to overcome the division bloc failed.     

The Evolving Role of the Africa Scholar in African Studies

This paper explores – through a geo-political perspective – the changes and continuities in South African foreign policy over the period 1990–2010, focusing on the themes of military relations, migration, democratization, and pan-Africanism. The demise of apartheid led to significant changes in South Africa's relations with southern Africa and the rest of Africa, including: transition of South Africa from pariah state to a key leader of the continent; an end to South Africa's destabilization of its immediate neighbours; transition toward more humane treatment of migrants; and transition toward a commitment to democracy promotion in Africa. Yet, continuities among the apartheid and post-apartheid eras persist, including: the persistence of nationalism and realism as guiding principles; ongoing economic and political constraints imposed by neighbouring countries; the persistence of socio-cultural divisions amongst South African and migrant workers; and overall ambivalence about pan-African identity and policies.