South African Jews and Apartheid

Jews were overwhelmingly over-represented among Whites in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. At the same time, the Jewish community remained inwardly focused on narrowly Jewish concerns; Jewish communal institutions, until relatively late, remained distant from the struggle against racial injustice, if not wholly complicit with the apartheid regime. In this essay, Adler attempts to account for both responses, activism and compliance, by examining the dilemmas faced by South African Jewry as a relatively small group of suspect Others living at the sufferance of the dominant and traditionally antisemitic Afrikaners. Anti-apartheid activism, he argues, was deeply rooted in Jewish culture and values, regardless of how secular the forms that it took were, and how disturbing it might have seemed to a fearful Jewish community pre-occupied with its own interests.     

Insurgency, counterinsurgency, and the rational peasant

Many rational choice treatments of guerrilla insurgency have focused on the strategic calculus by which government and insurgent elites use the tactical weapons of coercion and benefits to win the support of nonelites. This paper uses Frohlich and Oppenheimer's model of the rational tax payer/tax evader to develop a model of the decision calculus by which nonelites respond to the tactical behavior of elites and thereby choose between supporting the incumbent regime, its insurgent opposition or neither. This model is then used to assess the likely impact of various insurgent and counterinsurgent tactics on nonelite support and loyalty.     

Intersectional citizenship,violence, and lesbian resistance in South Africa

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature on intersectionality and citizenship, with scholars positing a need to analyze multiple identities simultaneously in order to understand both the legal incorporation and embodied experience of citizenship for marginalized groups. Building upon this central insight, I contribute to this literature by articulating the components of an intersectional citizenship framework to better understand the way multiple identities mediate citizenship, with particular reference to black lesbians in South Africa. Based on in-depth interviews with eighteen members of the black lesbian organization Free Gender, in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, I argue that Free Gender’s organizational goals can usefully be understood as asserting the commensurability of the identity “black lesbian” with “community member,” “African,” and “woman.” In applying a theoretical framework of intersectional citizenship to South Africa, it becomes clear that Free Gender’s activism reveals differential access to identities necessary to be seen as citizens entitled to rights. More than just extending juridical citizenship, black lesbians must have socially and politically legitimate access to multiple identity categories simultaneously in order to live free of violence.     

Apartheid Policing: examining the US migrant labour system through a South African Lens

This article draws a parallel between the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the post-IRCA immigration regime in the USA. I argue that both regimes were organised around Apartheid Policing, which may be defined as a legal process consisting of three mutually reinforcing mechanisms: differentiation of migrants into non-citizen insiders with legal residence rights and non-citizen outsiders without them; stabilisation of migrants as permanent or long-term residents, enabling the growth of the migrant workforce; and marginalisation of migrants as politically vulnerable outsiders, including exploitation at work. But the two regimes were supported by different political and ideological apparatuses. While placing a disproportionate burden on Latino migrants, the post-IRCA immigration regime differed from the Apartheid regime in that it was not organised around an explicit racial hierarchy, and offered non-citizens a greater array of rights. As a result, Apartheid Policing under the post-IRCA immigration regime is potentially more politically sustainable.     

Local government in the new South Africa

On 1 November 1995 the final piece in South Africa's democratic jigsaw was slotted into place when elections were held to create 686 new local authorities throughout the country. The new councils are confronted with a daunting task, as they have been championed by the national Government of National Unity (GNU) as the main delivery mechanism for social and economic redistribution as well as the vehicle for the achievement of the aims and objectives of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP). This article argues that the legislative framework developed for local government has an urban bias that has operated to the detriment of a manageable solution to the problems of rural local government in South Africa. The article examines the new structures of local democracy and argues that the need to secure local representation may have been achieved at the expense of functional efficiency. The lack of human and financial resources in some of the less developed councils makes service delivery problematic. If service delivery is not improved it could undermine the new local democracy as peoples' expectations remain unfulfilled. The article also examines the efforts to accommodate the political and economic demands of South Africa's traditional societies and the commercial farmers. The article argues that the efforts to incorporate these powerful elements into the new dispensation have largely failed, creating a potential for future disruption. The article concludes that the creation of a constitutional framework for local government must be seen as the first step in the development of autonomous local government, and that the main task now facing all three tiers of South Africa's government is the development of sufficient financial and human resources to ensure improvements in the standards of living of poor South Africans.     

Institution-building issues in South Africa

This article discusses structural and labour-market factors associated with institution building in South Africa. It pays particular attention to the role of management development in institution building in the public sector. Two case studies that address the question of organizational restructuring following moves towards commercialization of some public sector organizations are discussed.     

Decentralization in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Decentralization in South Africa was entrenched in the new democratic constitution of 1996 and charged local government with bringing basic and other services to the population. Our in-depth empirical study of 38 municipalities across South Africa indicates that the experiment with decentralization has largely failed to achieve its main aims—democratizing local government and delivering adequate basic services to all communities. In order to provide some answers to the question as to why this failure occurred, we focus attention on the legislative over-burdening of local government and its concurrent lack of institutional capacity to actually turn legal obligation and decentralization principles into practice as two of the main and related causes for this failure. While the South African constitution gave clear mandates to local government, the issue of adequate institutional capacity for municipal government was largely overlooked or ignored altogether.     

Fiscal Federalism in South Africa

The constitutional change in South Africa in the 1990s broughtabout the decentralization of substantial budgetary responsibilityto newly created provincial governments. This study capturesthe new assignment of functions and resources to the differentspheres of government in South Africa and provides an assessmenton the basis of a framework derived from fiscal federalism principles.It concludes that there is a substantial congruence betweenwhat can be viewed as theoretically desirable and what is outlinedin the South African Constitution of 1996, but observes significantdivergences between the Constitution and actual practice.     

COVID-19 in Nigeria and South Africa

COVID-19 is likely to affect Nigeria’s and South Africa’s economies adversely, amplifying preexisting macroeconomic weaknesses. Support for necessary public health measures remains flimsy in light of their harsh socio-economic impact, and will likely erode further should reported case numbers remain relatively low.     

Traditional Leaders and the Culture of Governance in South Africa

The global neoliberal economic and political order impregnated the emergence of democracy in South Africa. One of the hallmarks of this order is that the capacity of the state to transform society is constrained, particularly in the rural hinterlands. The incapacity of the state to extend its grip, both economically and politically, has provided traditional leaders with an opportunity to both recast themselves as intermediaries between state and society and elevate themselves to decision makers on behalf of large communities. The article examines the way in which traditional leaders have repositioned themselves in the new democracy, what their source of support is, and why the African National Congress government has come to support these efforts.