Towards understanding Botswana and South Africa’s ambivalence to liberal democracy

ABSTRACT

Despite their recognised democratic successes, Botswana and South Africa have had ambivalent experiences with liberal democracy. It is contended that they fall somewhere in-between what scholars refer to as electoral and liberal democracies; dominant party systems within Carothers’ ‘gray zone’. Two explanations are offered. The first relates to the underlying political culture of the ruling elite: the liberal democratic values of the founders and early elites of both the African National Congress (ANC) and the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) were never fully embedded; instead, their political cultures were influenced by traditions and ideologies with illiberal values. The second explanation focuses on a key feature of a liberal democracy – restraining of power, namely through encouraging an autonomous civil society and limiting executive access to the state. It is argued that for fear of losing their dominant positions, the ANC and the BDP resist restraints on their access to state power.     

South Africa’s Inclusion in BRICS: Challenges and Prospects for Development in Africa

Abstract

The forming of alliances on the international scene has reflected a provisional arrangement in the world economy. Amongst such alliances was the formation of BRICS by the five world economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa into what is commonly known as BRICS. BRICS is considered a joint initiative, aimed at shifting conventional norms in international economic and political cooperation to create a new trans-continental platform for these actors. Each member country in BRICS has, in one way or another, reflected growth either through its economy foreign policy, and developmental pursuit. However, South Africa is portrayed by some researchers as lagging behind, when compared to the other member countries. Hence, this study sought to analyse the potential mediumand long-term implications of South Africa's inclusion in BRICS. The study also aimed to underscore the benefits and risks associated with South Africa's membership in the alliance in the area of development; specifically poverty reduction, foreign policy, trade, and global partnership. The researchers collected secondary data to analytically critique the inclusion of South Africa in the BRICS alliance, its benefits, and shortcomings for development in South Africa, and in Africa as a whole. We argue that as a global player under BRICS, South Africa has opened a new vista of opportunities, including transnational gateways to Brazil, Russia, India, and China, with the attendant inflow of infrastructural and developmental investments, enriching educational exchanges and technology transfers. The article concludes by stressing the need for South Africa and other African countries to formulate policies that will drive meaningful development in their respective countries. The authors recommend that African leaders should come up with innate policies that are Africa-centred, that would incite development internally.     

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.     

South Africa’s multiple faces in current climate clubs

Climate clubs emerged as a concept to revitalise the international climate change negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and mitigate the free-riding problem. The underlying idea suggests that countries committed to reducing emissions can advance a stable coalition in the form of a club with other countries. As a result, more countries would put forth targets for more ambitious emissions reductions. This article analyses South Africa’s memberships in current climate related clubs. We contextualise South African climate club governance in its wider geopolitical and national context of low-carbon development. The purpose of the analysis is to identify if and how South Africa can possibly contribute to advancing ambition for change within climate clubs. Furthermore, it advances ideas about possible design options for climate clubs that may appeal to developing countries.     

On race,sport, and politics in South Africa’s past and present

There has been a steady emergence of quality writing about sport, politics, and the intersection between them in South African society in recent decades. This review essay looks at a number of recent works on soccer, rugby, and cricket, placing them within a larger context of race, sport, and politics in South Africa’s past and present.     

The ‘ballot and the brick’: protest,voting and non-voting in post-apartheid South Africa

Over the last decade, protest has become an enduring feature of the post-apartheid political landscape. Despite this wave of protest, the African National Congress (ANC) has largely retained its dominant status. The endurance of the ANC’s electoral support in spite of the high levels of protest has led Susan Booysen to conclude that protests in South Africa form part of a ‘dual repertoire’ of political contestation. She argues that protests are used to signal grievances to the ANC between elections but that, ultimately, people remain loyal to the party of liberation. This article interrogates Booysen’s claim through advancing an analysis of voting district and ward-level data in protest hotspots. The article highlights weaknesses in the methodological base of Booysen’s thesis. By analysing the support for the ANC amongst the estimated eligible voting-age population, this article suggests a different relationship between voting and protesting in post-apartheid South Africa.     

Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut and the Dialectics of Race in South Africa: Interrogating Images of Whiteness and Blackness in Black Literature and Culture

The public outcry against President Jacob Zuma’s labeling of black ownership of pet dogs as fundamentally “unAfrican” in 2012 and the academic debates around Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s proposal in 2011 for a 1% reparative wealth tax on whites is further evidence of the continued necessity of whiteness studies today, despite South Africa’s independence from a racist Afrikaner regime and its movement towards a nonracist society. Yet, the authority, agency, and normative value of whiteness continue to work covertly within an intellectual critique embedded in standardized interrogations of images and imaginations of race and culture. Kopano Matlwa’s popular debut novel, Coconut, is a necessary, self-reflexive commentary on the interdependent nature of racial inquiry. While critics typically read the novel as resoundingly critical of contemporary blackness, they fail to see its simultaneous evocation of the necessarily porous, performative, and continuously evolving character of race and culture generally. This paper acknowledges Matlwa’s concern with a superficial postapartheid blackness, but also argues that Coconut’s complex invocation of black culture exposes the impossibility of imaging and imagining blackness without imaging and imagining whiteness. In the continued satirical fetishization of whiteness, racial essentialism is destabilized and whiteness is positioned as an inevitable mirror on and of blackness. As such, the paper simultaneously questions the efficacy of “whiteness” studies that suggest the possibility of establishing separate and exclusive studies on race and culture.     

Rhetoric and Praxis: Nigeria’s Africa Diplomacy and the Shaping of the African Union

Although Nigeria has always promoted multilateral diplomacy in the African context, the civilian administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo made it a cardinal objective of its Africa policy. Through his foreign policy speeches, President Obasanjo emphasised the readiness of his administration to play a leading role in African continental organisation – the African Union (AU). Using data collected through the secondary and interview methods, and thematic analysis, this study analyses Obasanjo’s diplomatic outing in the AU. While there were some encumbrances (such as the failure on occasion to make wider consultations within the AU framework and the absence of a well coordinated inter-ministerial approach to project Nigeria’s leadership in the AU), the paper contends that the administration’s diplomacy in the AU was successful. This showed in the role the administration played in shaping the structures that currently define the existence of the organisation. The transmutation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to AU, the recalibration of its peace and security architecture, and the funding of the organisation benefited immensely from Nigeria’s diplomacy under President Obasanjo.     

South Africa and the global economy: We need to talk about ‘how’

Baker, P., Boraine, A. and W. Krafchik (eds) South Africa and the World Economy in the 1990s The Brookings Institution, in association with IDASA and the Aspen Institute published by David Philip, Cape Town: 1993. 263 pages including bibliography and index. Price: R54.95.     

South Africa’s foreign policy aspirations and the National Development Plan (NDP 2030): the role of soft power

Chapter 7 of the NDP 2030 articulates a foreign policy vision for South Africa over two decades. While the NDP acknowledges the place of ‘soft power’ in realising this vision, it remains doubtful whether South Africa will indeed take advantage of the enormous gains offered by soft power as a foreign policy lever. This paper examines the role of soft power in achieving the foreign policy mandates prescribed in the Plan. It argues that, like other regional powers such as China, South Africa needs to pay more attention to its soft power attributes if it is to fast-track the successful implementation of its foreign policy ambitions for 2030. We conclude that sustaining South Africa’s rising position and influence in the international system and in Africa, will largely depend on its ability to consciously adjust its foreign policy trajectories – in the long term – in tandem with its soft power resources and competences.     

Political imperatives and military preparations: New insights into why South Africa’s 1998 intervention in Lesotho went awry

In September 1998 South African troops crossed into Lesotho to restore stability to the small mountain kingdom that had been roiled by protests for months. Operation Boleas encountered heavy resistance – in the ensuing chaos dozens died and the towns of Maseru, Mohale’s Hoek and Mafeteng were damaged. Media and scholarly commentary on the intervention was scathing, but in the rush to judge there has been insufficient effort to chronicle and clarify. This article uses declassified archival records and interviews with policy makers to provide a more exhaustive explanation of how the Mandela Administration decided on the deployment of troops into Lesotho. It focuses on the difficulty South African officials had in aligning their political objectives with the military exigencies of the rapidly changing crisis. This re-examination of the Lesotho intervention rectifies historical inaccuracies while also identifying potential problems that policy makers should be conscious of when considering future peace missions.     

South Africa’s civil war, 1985–1995

The end of apartheid in South Africa is typically characterised as ‘peaceful’. However, between 1985 and 1995, South Africa experienced a civil war in which more than 20,000 people died. In this war, the African National Congress (ANC) implemented a strategy of ‘people’s war’ based on Vietnam’s experience while the government pursued a counterinsurgency strategy based on models employed by the United States. In the war’s second phase, the ANC and Inkatha employed unconventional tactics in a campaign to gain political and military control of disputed territory. Owing to its success in the war, the ANC was able to prevent its rivals from significantly limiting its power in the central government after 1994 as well as exclude Inkatha from operating in key areas even in its home province.     

Security,Nationalism and Popular Culture: Screening South Korea’s Uneasy Identity in the Early 2000s

By examining the cultural representations of the South Korean notion of the Self/Other in relation to its major traditional enemy — North Korea — this article aims to capture a picture of South Korea’s discursive economy of the North, and to problematise the South Korean identities implicated in that economy in the early 2000s. To achieve these aims, this article focuses on representations of a successful popular South Korean film which was released in 2000, just a few months after the first inter-Korean summit: Joint Security Area JSA. By analytically reading JSA, it is revealed that, in South Korea, the traditional discursive practices based on the Cold War thinking have been eroded. For the South, the North is part of the Self (Korean-ness; love for the North as the same nation) and, at the same time, is an Other (South Korean-ness; contempt for the North as an inferior state). Related to this, South Korea appears to be the uneasy Self without a firm Other in between Korean-ness and South Korean-ness.