Books and Book Chapters (Political Studies)
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Browsing by Author "Piper, Laurence"
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Item Faith-based organisations, local governance and citizenship in South Africa(University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009) Piper, LaurenceItem Further from the people – bipartisan ‘nationalisation’ thwarting the electoral system(SUN Press, 2012) Piper, LaurenceThis chapter argues that local government elections offer a unique opportunity in South Africa’s political system for voters to practice forms of democracy that are more local, plural and accountable in character than at provincial or national level. A key reason for this is the mixed electoral system where half of all councillors are directly elected from the wards in which they live. The 2011 election supplied significant evidence of voters attempting to make use of this opportunity, particularly around the candidate selection process of the major parties, and through the accountability talk that dominated public debate. However, analysis of both ‘supply’ (party behaviour) and ‘demand’ (voter choice) suggests that this democratic potential was outweighed by bipartisan politics between the ANC and DA which affirmed the national over the local, a choice between two parties over many, and reinforced identity-based political loyalties over the direct accountability of politicians. In short, the 2011 elections were rendered a proxy for a national competition, frustrating much of the unique democratic potential that local government elections offer, effectively taking local politics further from the people. The proposal to hold national, provincial and local elections simultaneously in the future will further impede the democratic potential of the local electoral system.Item Informality disallowed: State restrictions on informal traders and micro-enterprises in Browns farm, Cape Town, South Africa(Pan-African University Press, 2019) Piper, Laurence; Charman, Andrew; Petersen, LeifThis chapter examines the impact of regulations and law enforcement on the economic activities of informal traders and micro-entrepreneurs in marginalised communities on the urban periphery. Our case site is Browns Farm, Philippi, a township in the City of Cape Town, South Africa, where a micro-enterprise census and business operator survey was conducted in 2011 (Charman et al, 2015). The chapter argues that despite the signi¿cant number of informal businesses in South African townships, the state continues to pursue efforts that either prevent formalisation or circumscribe informal activities. At the heart of our argument is the assertion that the informal economic practices of the urban poor constitute a ‘lived economy’ whoseItem The Inkatha Freedom Party: Between the Impossible and the Ineffective.(Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) Piper, LaurenceFrom the perspective of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the 2004 election was remarkable in two ways. First, the IFP fared worse than ever. Formed by Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi in 1975, the party is rooted in rural Zulu people of the KwaZulu-Natal province. During the apartheid era, the IFP virtually was the KwaZulu government. After 1994, it was the leading party in the province, and a governing partner of the African National Congress (ANC) at the national level. The 2004 election saw the IFP lose its thirty years of dominance in KwaZulu-Natal to the ANC, and with it, the party’s stake in national government.Item Introduction: The Crucial Role of Mediators in Relations between States and Citizens(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Piper, Laurence; von Lieres, BettinaThis book sets out to answer a deceptively simple question: how do citizens and state engage in the global south? The answer is not simple; it is indeed complex and multifaceted, but we argue that much of the time this engagement involves a practice of intermediation. From local to international level, citizens are almost always represented to the state through third parties that are distinguished by the intermediary role that they play. These intermediaries include political parties, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), community-based organisations, social movements, armed non-state actors, networks and individuals. For its part, the state often engages citizens through intermediaries from private service providers to civil society activists and even local militia.Item Mediation and the contradictions of representing the urban poor in South Africa: The case of SANCO leaders in Imizamo Yethu in Cape Town, South Africa.(Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2014) Piper, Laurence; Bénit-Gbaffou, ClaireThe formal system of local governance in South Africa has the ‘ward’ as its lowest and smallest electoral level — a spatial unit consisting of between 5,000 and 15,000 voters. The ward is equivalent to the ‘constituency’ in much of the rest of the world. Notably, the history of South Africa means that the vast majority of people live in ‘communities’ or neighbourhoods that are far smaller in scale than the ward, and most of these are the site of multiple claims of informal leadership by a variety of local organisations and their leaders. For example, the Cape Town ward, in which our case study is located, includes at least five different communities, distinguished in racial and class terms.Item Popular mobilisation, party dominance and participatory governance in South Africa(Zed Books, 2010) Piper, Laurence; Nadvi, LubnaThis chapter seeks to explore the character of popular mobilization in South Africa, mostly at the local level. This is done through exploring the interaction of two independent processes. The first concerns the relative empowerment of political parties and the disempowerment of civil society (especially social movements) by the democratization process in South Africa. The second concerns the introduction of new institutions of public participation in local governance. Hence, while the latter are portrayed as ‘invited spaces’ in which communities can engage the local state constructively, the poor design of these spaces, a lack of genuine will on the part of elites and the relative power of key social actors mean that, in practice, they are either meaningless processes or simply co-opted by political parties. Notably, civil society has tended either to disengage from the local state and focus on provincial and national levels, or to resort to forms of popular protest to be heard by local government – the non-governmental organization (NGO) sector usually favouring the first approach and social movements the second.Item The tale of two publics: Media, political representation and citizenship in Hout Bay,(HSRC Press, 2017) Piper, Laurence; Anciano, Fiona.; von Lieres, BettinaThis chapter makes the case that access to the spaces of public debate in post-apartheid South Africa is about the challenge of political representation as much as it is about the challenge of access to communication technologies. These representational issues centre on the racialised and partisan nature of state-society relations framed, in part, through identity discourses and, for many poor citizens, patronage politics linked to local governance. In the urban setting this often also takes a spatial form linked to the neighbourhood or community, and involves local leaders who invoke the exclusive right to mediate for poor and marginalised groups in the name of liberation nationalism and service delivery – elsewhere termed the politics of the ‘party-society’.Item Tenderpreneur (also tenderpreneurship and tenderpreneurism)(UCL Press, 2018) Piper, Laurence; Charman, Andrew‘Tenderpreneur’ is a South African colloquialism for a businessperson who uses political contacts to secure government procurement contracts (called ‘tenders’) often as part of reciprocal exchange of favours or benefits. The term is a portmanteau of ‘tender’ (to provide business services) and ‘entrepreneur’. Today, ‘tenderpreneurs’ are associated with corruption, nepotism and clientelism. This is because the award of many tenders is driven by informal interests and/or political affiliation, rather than the requirements of formal procedure. The informality of ‘tenderpreneurship’ thus resides in these extra-legal social and political relationships.