Browsing by Author "Gottschalk, Keith"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
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    African peacekeeping and African integration: Current challenges
    (RUDN University, 2020) Gottschalk, Keith
    Peacekeeping and economic union are the two most important dimensions of African integration. The first section of this article aims to analyse some current challenges to African peacekeeping, peacemaking, and African integration. The continuing Libyan civil war epitomizes the diplomatic stalemates and military stalemates which form the limits of current African peacekeeping. It exposes the North African Regional Capability and North African Standby Brigade as paper structures which do not exist operationally, and so limit the capacity of the African Union’s Peace and Security Council. The military intervention of states outside Africa can polarize conflicts and escalate civil wars. Africa’s colonial epoch serves as a warning of the potential dangers of foreign military bases in Africa. In parts of West Africa, states sub-contract peacemaking and anti-terrorist operations to unsupervised local militias, which are lawless at best, and commit ethnic killings at worst. African integration fares better in the economic dimension.
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    The African Union and its sub-regional structures
    (Adonis & Abbey Publishers, 2012) Gottschalk, Keith
    After seven decades of episodic existence through conferences, the Pan-African project became permanently institutionalised with the founding of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963, with a qualitative upgrade into the African Union in 2002. Much academic literature on African integration and the OAU-AU is pessimistic. Most media commentary is dismissive of the AU, and derogatory of the Pan-African Parliament. This article seeks to trace the on-going evolution of the OAU-AU, and enquire how the AU stands up to contemporary regional organisations. This makes it focus on operationalised ground truth, rather than entities which exist mostly on paper. The African Union and its regional communities have achieved significantly more - and attempted vastly more - than a score of contemporaries such as the Organisation of American States, the League of Arab States, the Association of South-East Asian Nations, and the Southern Common Market. Among regional communities, the African Union is arguably second in accomplishments to only the European Union, which has a three orders of magnitude larger budget and personnel establishment. The African Union's operations focus on peace-making, while its institution-building focuses on economic integration and development.
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    Astronaissance: Communicating astronomy & space to the African imagination
    (2013) Gottschalk, Keith
    Astronaissance neatly conceptualizes the crossover between the African Renaissance, the re-emergence of Astronomy in Africa, and the rise of cognate space sciences and astronautics. Story-telling, painting, engraving, writing, and above all, viewing the heavens above, have always been amongst the strategies for communicating this excitement and wonder. Today, astronomy societies, the internet, media and mobile phone apps, and other public outreach projects are crucial when, for the first time ever, a majority of Africa’s people now live under the light-polluted skies of our continent’s towns and cities. Space-related products and services are woven into the fabric of our daily life as never before. Policy-makers, budget-allocators, and managers need to see as essential to their strategy communicating to Africa’s citizens, voters, and taxpayers, the necessity of Astronomy, the other space sciences, and Astronautics.
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    The choice of atomic power for electricity in South Africa
    (2013) Gottschalk, Keith
    South Africa needs to both increase its electricity generation, and to incrementally transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources. The most cost-effective strategy would be a mix of imported hydropower, solar power, and imported gas, which is cleaner than burning local coal. A small but skilful atomic power lobby driven by a relatively few bureaucrats, engineers, and politicians has successfully dominated electricity decision-making over choice of generation options under both late apartheid and the first two decades of democracy. The Government’s tenacious determination to choose atomic power is price-inelastic, which indicates that political considerations, not economic, are the driver.
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    The growth of space science in African countries for earth observation in the 21st century
    (Academy of Science of South Africa, 2013) Ngcofe, Luncedo; Gottschalk, Keith
    The vulnerability of Africa to the impact of climate change, which results in natural disasters and environmental degradation, accelerates hardship and poverty for millions of Africans. However, Africa still lacks the necessary scientific and technical capacity to assess fully and to monitor the possible future impacts of climate change. One of the instruments available to address the challenges of environmental monitoring (including climate change)and to provide early warnings of natural and human-made disasters for Africa's development is Earth observation satellites. Earth observation satellites record Earth's information from space and provide accurate, continuous, simultaneous measurements of our planet. The results of the application of Earth observation satellites have long term social benefits which include the early detection of hurricanes and typhoons that can lead to prompt warnings for areas predicted to be affected, thus providing crucial time to implement safety measures to mitigate the effects of such disasters. Several authors concur with this position, stating that the global view from satellite observation is unmatched in its ability to capture the dynamics and variability of Earth processes. The capability to predict weather (among other things) has led Earth observation satellites to become essential to everyday applications that improve human safety and quality of life. However, despite the many benefits of the use of Earth observation satellites, it still remains a major challenge for Africa to explore the full potential of Earth observation satellites in addressing continental needs (Figure 1). This commentary assesses the status of Africa in regard to Earth observation satellites.
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    How does the National Housing Policy of South Africa promote economic justice?
    (University of the Western Cape, 2002) Boezak, Lynn; Gottschalk, Keith
    Lack of adequate housing is a key feature of poverty in South Africa. After the first democratic election in 1994, Government has faced the challenge of reconstruction and development, particularly with regard to improving the living conditions of those most disadvantaged by Apartheid. Inheriting a housing backlog as well as a fragmented and discriminatory approach to housing policy, Government has sought to make adequate housing affordable to especially those with little or no income. This mini-thesis aims to assess the approach of Government to the housing crisis. It does so by evaluating the National Housing Policy in the context of key legislation and policies that have shaped Government's response to the onslaught of poverty. The Constitution, the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR) are the specific documents considered in terms of its impact on the nature of government's development priorities and its approach to addressing these priorities. The concept of economic justice is used as a basis on which to assess the Government policies in question. The Government's Subsidy Programme and its efforts to encourage private sector investment in housing are identified as the key strategies employed by Government to solving the housing crisis. The main conclusions are that in the context of unemployment and low incomes, the advantages of the Subsidy Programme are limited because the poor have a limited capacity to improve on the houses provided by the subsidy. Also the government relies too heavily on the private sector to provide housing. It is difficult to maintain consistent private sector involvement because this sector's primary motivation is profit and the low-income sector is considered a high risk investment. This is not an effective strategy in attempting to resolve the housing crisis. Furthermore, the benefits of the Subsidy Programme, while enhancing economic equity by targeting the very poor, are limited because it relies on the availability of supplementary resources for housing. The implications of these factors for economic justice are that the equity cannot be fully achieved while improvement in the poor's economic capacity moves at a much slower pace than their capacity to improve their social conditions, specifically with regard to housing. Much more investment in housing from Government is proposed. Initiatives that could be utilised more are the establishment of more public works programmes and savings-linked credit schemes. The mini-thesis concludes that the national housing policy promotes economic justice only to limited extent, because of the problems identified with the strategies to place more emphasis on mobilising alternative resources, which are difficult to achieve in the current economic context the country finds itself in.
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    Pan-African initiatives in global governance
    (2013) Gottschalk, Keith
    As recently as 2009, a five hundred page textbook on international relations did not even mention the African Union in its index. The same applied to the Wikipedia entry on international organizations until a colleague of this author corrected that omission in 2011. The mainstream international relations literature has the perspective that our continent is marginal, the AU invisible, and Africa is a problem, that is spoken to, or spoken for. African agency in global governance is a perspective whose time has come. Drawing on constructivist and transformational theories, this paper explores how the African Union family or organizations, including its regional communities such as COMESA, EAC, ECOWAS, and SADC, seek to engage with and negotiate Africa’s positioning in global governance. These Pan-African initiatives go far beyond anything that ASEAN, the Arab League, or the OAS have succeeded in. This paper draws upon research by the author and Kiki Edozie for their forthcoming book The African Union’s Africa. (Michigan State University Press, 2014)
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    Persistent problems in African integration and peace-keeping
    (Sabinet, 2018) Gottschalk, Keith
    African economic integration and peacekeeping constitute respectively the largest institutionalization, and the largest operationalization, of the African Union (AU) and its sub-regional organisations. The number of African soldiers and police in AU and United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations has grown steadily. Sometimes, major strategic decisions have been mistakes which aggravated, or even catalysed conflicts that would not otherwise have occurred. The peacekeeping missions in Nigeria and Somalia are examples of these. Peacekeeping operations are in the larger scheme of things part of the on-going project of African integration. This paper identifies major problems that remain persistent after half a century of protracted Pan-Africanist endeavours at subregional and continental integration. One recurrent occurrence is the chasm between aspirational treaties voluntarily signed, and their implementation, taking at best a decade or decades. Often, entities founded on paper remain dormant, until in a subsequent decade another structure is founded to operationalize the function of the previous paper entity, with this process going through several iterations.
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    Some aspects of South Africa’s foreign policy on the civil wars in Côte D’Ivoire, Libya, and Mali
    (2013) Gottschalk, Keith
    During the 1960s, intervention in Africa by both the UNO and former colonial powers such as France was imposed on Africans. After half a century, Pan-Africanists have started to challenge, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully, the dominant powers in global governance. Pan-Africanism has been the political driver for these counter-hegemonic attempts. Today African agency seeks to negotiate interventions in Africa to ensure they are at least partly by Africans and with Africans instead of external intervention in Africa. There was complex dynamics between the AU, ECOWAS, NATO, the Arab League, and France during interventions in the civil wars in Côte D’Ivoire, Libya, and Mali. This paper argues that when the Pan-African agenda diverged from NATO preferences, South Africa and other African Union members faced major challenges in asserting African agency. When there was consensus between western and Pan-African actors, the African Union took the leading role.
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    South Africa's space programme - Past, present, future
    (Routledge, 2010) Gottschalk, Keith
    This article introduces and analyses South Africa’s space programme. This divides into three phases. First was the age of amateurs 1947-1962. Second, between 1963-1993, South Africa’s apartheid ancien regime started various missile projects. A secret military space launcher programme aimed at orbiting reconnaissance satellites. Under US Government pressure, this was cancelled before the first democratically-elected government came to power, and the facilities for manufacturing and testing solid propellant missiles destroyed. But South Africa still maintains a nucleus of space heritage infrastructure, including a coastal space launch range with telemetry capabilities, satellite testing and integration facilities, and modest aerospace and software industrial sectors. Third, South Africa became a democracy in 1994, and rolled out the legal and institutional infrastructure for a space programme. It is increasingly active in COPUOS and other international forums. South Africa has started to shape a new space policy, this time with public transparency. Since developing countries have severe resource constraints (aggravated by global recessions) the reviving future of South Africa’s space programme clearly needs to involve bilateral and multilateral partnerships. First fruits are that South Africa has negotiated with Algeria, Kenya, and Nigeria, the African Resource Management constellation, to pool imagery and other remote sensing data from all their microsats.
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    US foreign policy toward Southern Africa - 1975 to 1990: the case of the Namibian Independence struggle
    (University of the Western Cape, 2007) Diamonds, Herman Pule; Gottschalk, Keith; Dept. of Political Studies; Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences
    This study, in contrast to contemporary held views relating to the US policy premises, aimed to look at the inherent disabilities and inconsistencies of the policies of successive Washington administrations. More so, it investigated the US interventionist strategies to perceived threats from communist regimes and their allies, especially in Southern Africa. To be able to embark on such an investigation, Namibia and the Soviet-Cuban involvement in Southern Africa were selected as a special focus of this study.