Conference Papers (Political Studies)

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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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    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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    Resisting informal settlement upgrading in Cape Town: The battle between developmental and informal governance
    (Academia, 2019) Piper, Laurence
    The paper explores the peculiar politics of popular resistance to the upgrading of an informal settlement in Imizamo Yethu, Cape Town, following a major fire in 2017. The paper traces the politics around the response to the fire by the city and contending groups of poor residents, many of whom, paradoxically, continue to resist the upgrading of the burn site. While this politics maps somewhat onto identity politics between local and foreign migrants to the city, the paper contends that it is the imposition of what Chatterjee terms developmental governance of needy populations onto emergent but informal forms of entrepreneurship that underwrites this larger conflict. This is but one example of the multiple and contending forms of governance evident in the city that help explain the divergent ways in which residents experience urban rule along racial, national and class lines; and which constitute an obstacle for more just and inclusive rule.