Research Articles (Political Studies)

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Staying the course: lessons from South Africa for irreversibility of nuclear disarmament
(Routledge, 2024) Pretorius, Joelien
To conceptualise irreversibility of nuclear disarmament, it is better to think about nuclear disarmament as a historical process than a historical moment. I apply a path-dependency lens to do so in the case of South Africa. During the formative phase of its nuclear disarmament, narratives of intent were employed to take advantage of windows of opportunity brought about by historical contingencies and conjectures. It allowed South African decision-makers to set the disarmament course and take the first steps down this path. Timing and sequencing of decisions, actions and announcements played an important role in locking in the behaviour of actors that could have reversed the process in this crucial stage. The choice to stay the disarmament course has since been informed by cost-benefit and normative drivers to reach an equilibrium point. This point reflects a circumscribed understanding of irreversibility of nuclear disarmament for South African policymakers, namely demilitarising fissile material and putting it under international safeguards. This is the status of South Africa’s highly enriched uranium (HEU) today. For South Africa to move towards a broader understanding of irreversibility that includes relinquishing HEU and giving up the right to uranium enrichment will require “coordination” of similar efforts in a broader move to nuclear disarmament by nuclear-armed states.
Complexity, depoliticisation, and African nuclear ordering agency: a meso-level exploration
(Routledge, 2024) Pretorius, Joelien; Vaughan, Tom
The regional nuclear ordering terrain in Africa is increasingly complex, with proliferating and deepening institutional relationships to the institutions of the global nuclear order. Applying a ‘complexity lens’ to this regional institutional apparatus may therefore seem like an intuitive way to understand its role in global nuclear ordering at large, and Africa’s place within it. However, one important concern when thinking about complex multinational regimes is depoliticisation. This has been examined in contexts of global development as well as nuclear order and we show this as a key feature of meso nuclear ordering in Africa. A complexity lens is useful to analyse the characteristics of the African regional institutional terrain. However, a complexity lens can perpetuate this depoliticisation if it does not acknowledge the political thrusts which underlie conceptions of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’.
Exploring barriers and facilitators to knowledge transfer and learning processes through a cross-departmental collaborative project in a municipal organization
(Emerald, 2023) Sunnemark, Fredrik; Westin, Wilma Lundqvist; Assmo, Per
This study aims to explore barriers and facilitators for knowledge transfer and learning processes by examining a cross-departmental collaborative project in the municipal organization. It is based on a R&D collaboration between University West and a Swedish municipality. Design/methodology/approach: To explore the barriers and facilitators, the data collection was made through observation of the project implementation process, as well as 20 interviews with public servants and external actors. To conduct a systematic qualitative-oriented content analysis, the article constructs and applies a theoretical analytical framework consisting of different factors influencing knowledge transfer and learning processes within a municipal organizational setting.
Whites and democracy in South Africa
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Piper, Laurence
In this wide-ranging book, Professor Roger Southall interrogates the attitudes ofwhite South Africans in respect of politics, democracy, and race relations in thecountry. The book is organised into three sections: thefirst is historical, focusingon South Africa as a white-dominated settler society that transitioned to a formalnon-racial democracy, and the attitudes of white South Africans in regard to thishistory. The second section deals with white attitudes towards democracy after1994, unpacked in relation to policy, party, and identity concerns. The thirdfocuses on the future of white people in South African politics.There are ample interesting and rich insights in this text, many of which couldhave been further developed in relation to the volume of supporting contextualand theoretical content. Of these, however, two arguments stand out. Thefirst isthat, despite benefitting from a racist settler society historically, ordinary whiteSouth Africans have largely embraced democracy today.
Political identity as temporal collapse: Ethiopian federalism and contested ogaden histories
(African Affairs, 2023) Matshanda, Namhla Thando; Thompson, Daniel K
Since the 1980s, analyses of African political identities have emphasized identity manipulation as a governance tool. In the Somali Horn of Africa, however, politicians’ efforts to reinvent identities confront rigid understandings of genealogical clanship as a key component of identity and political mobilization. This article explores how government efforts to construct a new ‘Ethiopian–Somali’ identity within Ethiopia’s ethnic-federal system are entangled with attempts to reinterpret clan genealogies and histories. We focus on efforts to revise the history of clans within the broader Ogaden Somali clan group and trace the possibilities and limits of these revisions in relation to legacies of colonialism as well as popular understandings of Ogaden identity. Drawing on feldwork and archival research, we show that political struggles over Somalis’ integration with Ethiopia orient around Somali clanship, but that clanship is not a mechanical tool of mobilization, as it is often portrayed. We suggest that genealogical relatedness does not equate to political loyalty, but genealogical discourse provides a framework by which various actors reinterpret contemporary events by collapsing history into the present to imbue clan, ethnic, and national identities with political signifcance.
Implementing accountability and transparency in supranational organisations: a comparison of the European Union and the African Union, 2001-2020
(Journal of African Union Studies (JoAUS), 2021) Baba, Awonke; Mngomezulu, Bheki R.
Despite discernible efforts by African political leaders to serve their people since the demise of colonialism and apartheid, African institutions are generally claimed to be ineffective. This indictment is partly due to their reliance on foreign donors and multilateral institutions for their financial survival. Another reason is failure by African leaders to implement their cogently thought through policy decisions as well as lack of unity which comes from the colonial legacy. The aim of this paper is to interrogate these perceptions using the African Union (AU) as a case study. To achieve this goal, the paper traces the history of the AU and juxtaposes it with the European Union (EU) to establish points of divergence. The paper uses institutionalismas its grounding theory. There is a general tendency in the scholarship to summarily dismiss African institutions without providing a closer analysis of what is at play. This paper aims to fill this lacuna by enumerating factors that weaken the AU as an institution. The key argument is that the lack of transparency and accountability in the AU cannot be understood in a vacuum. Thus, context is deemed critical in the analysis. The paper then proffers ideas on the way forward
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.
Globalization, the latest mode of production in the world system: How regional powers have intensified and expanded capitalism
(Common Ground Research Networks, 2018) Nelson-Richards, Melsome Mordechai; Mutizwa-Mangiza, Shingai
This article examines globalization as a mode of production, tracing it from the pre-capitalist mode in Africa and linking it to the capitalist mode and, finally, the globalization mode. It is intensified and directed by the USA and the European Union through global foreign direct investment, treaties, conventions, and other initiatives by the European Union. It concludes that Asia, free from civil strife for five decades (unlike Africa), and with less stranglehold by capitalism and implementing progressive policies, has fared much better.
Book review: Building a capable state: service delivery in post-apartheid South Africa
(SAGE, 2019) Piper, Laurence
Written by long-standing research practitioners Ian Palmer and Nishendra Moodley, as well as one of South Africa’s leading academic urbanists, Professor Sue Parnell, Building a Capable State tackles the hard question of whether the post-apartheid state is up to delivering rights-based, sustainable development, and more specifically the task of providing local services like water, electricity, roads and housing. Somewhat surprisingly, after 10 years of maladministration and even deliberate sabotage under the Zuma administration, the answer is a qualified yes. Today South Africa’s citizens, especially poor citizens, are substantially better off than they were in 1994.
Power in action: Democracy, citizenship and social justice by Steven Friedman
(2019) Piper, Laurence
Steven Friedman has long been one of South Africa’s premier public intellectuals, making invaluable and thoughtful contributions on the political issues of the day. In Power in Action, he zooms out from everyday issues to reflect on politics and democracy more generally, but it’s a view deeply informed by quotidian struggles and also by the South African experience. At its heart, Friedman’s argument is that contention and agency are what bring political change, and that making democracy real means that the poor and marginalised must confront the state in an organised way and on an ongoing basis. Only by challenging government every day through collective action will ordinary citizens claim the power to influence decisions that affect their daily lives – which for Friedman is the fundamental meaning of democracy.
Political violence in KwaZulu-Natal
(CPLO, 2018) Krelekrele, Thembela
After 25 years of democracy, political violence remains one of the greatest challenges that continuously undermine South Africa’s constitutional state. The province of KwaZuluNatal accounts for the majority of political violence that occurs in South Africa and, especially around election time, fear and anxiety loom as political assassinations increase. The 2016 local government elections brought an end to the single dominant party situation in some major metros and rural municipalities, but the process that preceded the elections was marked by numerous political killings in KwaZulu-Natal.
Response to Prathama Banerjee's sovereignty and ascendancy: south Asian reflections
(Academia, 2018) Piper, Laurence
In this fantastic, wide-ranging but closely argued paper Prathama Banerjee makes the case that the concept of sovereignty is not a universal concept, but rather that it has a particular, substantive meaning developed in Europe over many centuries. Furthermore, this substantive meaning can be contrasted with alternative notions of 'rulership' in South Asia that Banerjee terms variously 'overlordship' or 'ascendancy'. At the heart of this contrast is the degree to which political power is imagined as absolute and unqualified versus accounts where the power of the political leader is imagined as qualified, counterbalanced , networked and nodal. At the moment of colonialism in south Asia, Banerjee concludes, this latter conception of political power was supplanted by the colonial imaginary and reproduced in post-colonial rule, with indigenous traditions forgotten. In developing this contrast between the European conception of sovereignty and the south Asian theory of ascendancy, Banerjee is doing far more than a history of ideas or an exercise in comparative political theory. This is because she is not only analyzing the evolution of ideas down time (both accounts of sovereignty and ascendancy are also arguments about how to understand political practice). Nor is she simply comparing different theories of state or kingly power, although this kind of exercise sits at the heart of this paper. Rather, through reconstructing a version of sovereignty and contrasting it with a new theory of 'ascendant' rule, Banerjee is advocating for 'thinking across traditions' to become 'a composer and assembler of a new theory from different sources and different histories'.
Explain initially the main driving forces of this globalisation process of manufacturing since the 1980’s? Use thereafter a multinational company (MNC) to illustrate what main positive and negative factors a company takes into consideration when deciding where to locate its production facilities?
(Academia, 2017) Ranchod, Mischal
Globalization constitutes the economic shift in companies from domestic (home) to global (host) economic systems. Global trade liberalization facilitates globalization through free-trade, reduced tariffs and quotas with more open economic policies emerging.
A realist perspective of president trumps first un general assembly speech
(Academia, 2017) Ranchod, Mischal
On 19 September 2017, president of the United States of America (USA), Donald Trump, took the podium at the New York-based institution of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). In his speech, Trump provided global leaders and diplomats with a radically different angle to view world politics, creating a divide between the “righteous many” and “wicked few.” He deters away from the mainstream issues of climate change to more realistically humanitarian concerns, where nation-states are currently being impacted and threatened by international or domestic terror.
Why treating water scarcity as a security issue is a bad idea.
(The Conversation Africa, 2018) Pretorius, Joelien
Helen Zille, the Premier of the Western Cape in South Africa, has made two startling claims about the water crisis in the province. She says there will be anarchy when the taps run dry, and that normal policing will be inadequate. She stated this as fact. Neither claim has any basis in truth. But they reflect an “elite panic”: society’s elite’s fear of social disorder. We see this when public officials and the media draw on stereotypes of public panic and disorder, or, in Zille’s words, “anarchy”
Reproducing toxic election campaigns: Negative campaigning and race-based politics in the Western Cape
(Sabinet, 2015) Africa, Cherrel
The 2014 election in the Western Cape was once again a high-stakes, fiercely-contested affair. Political parties saw the Western Cape as an ‘open race’ and the province became the centre of vigorous campaign efforts in the lead-up to the election. The African National Congress (ANC), which had lost control of the province because its vote share dropped from 45% in 2004 to 32% in 2009, hoped to unseat the Democratic Alliance (DA), which had won in 2009 by a very narrow margin (51%). The ANC felt that it had done enough to regain control of the province, especially in light of deep-seated disillusionment in many communities and the violent protests that took place prior to the election.While the ANC maintained its support base, winning votes from 33% of the provincial electorate, the type of identity-based campaign it pursued combined with other factors to work to the DA’s advantage.
Non-racialism and the African National Congress: views from the branch
(Taylor & Francis group, 2014) Anciano, Fiona.
South Africa’s ruling party is well known as an organisation that supports the ideal of non-racialism. However, the extent to which the African National Congress (ANC) has defined and instrumentalised the concept of non-racialism is contested. This article looks at the history of non-racialism in the party and more recent interpretations by ANC leadership, before examining how non-racialism is understood, 19 years into democracy, by members of the party. Based on interviews with over 45 ANC branch members, the article describes how members, broadly speaking, have deep-seated concerns with non-racialism in the ANC and in society more generally. There is recognition from ANC branch members that race relations have significantly improved since the ANC moved into government; however, they feel not enough change has taken place and that racial tensions are impeding social cohesion and concomitant growth and progress in the country. There is division among members in regards to the efficacy and impact of the party’s racially based policies such as affirmative action as well as the manner in which race potentially influences leadership opportunities within the party. Furthermore, the article shows that there is lack of definition and direction on the part of the ANC in regards to the instrumentalisation of non-racialism, and this deficiency has negative consequences for racial cohesion in the party. The article concludes by discussing how investigations into party branches through the lens of non-racialism, highlights more deep-seated concerns about local-level party democracy and a party fractured at the grassroots.
Rethinking non-racialism: Reflections of a selection of South African leaders
(Taylor & Francis group, 2017) Anciano-White, Fiona.; Selemani, Johnny Alubu
T Drawing from in-depth interviews with 26 prominent South Africans, this article looks at how leaders in government, political parties, business and civil society understand and interpret non-racialism today. It interrogates whether non-racialism is an active political and social project among leaders in South Africa and whether, and how, they are attempting to redefine nonracialism. The article demonstrates that non-racialism is a term still ambiguously understood and defined by South African leaders. Some respondents consider races to be products of social construction and, as such, believe these constructions can be transcended. For many, however, the idea of multiracialism prevails over that of non-racialism. Although non-racialism remains largely a rhetorical ideal among many leaders, respondents did have well-defined views of the challenges facing non-racialism, particularly those of socio-economic inequality and poor leadership from the African National Congress (ANC). Overall, there is a strong sense from many respondents that the values of nonracialism are currently under threat. However, through using social sectors such as education and the media, as well as fostering open debate on non-racialism and facilitating stronger leadership from all areas of society, interviewees did see potential for building a path toward a non-racial South Africa
The election result and its implications for political party configuration
(Sabinet, 2004) Piper, Laurence
As a competition for both popular support and political office, Election 2004 deepened the dominant-party system in South Africa. In terms of support, the African National Congress (ANC) did better than ever. Indeed, its leadership seemed more concerned about internal left-wing politics than about rival parties. Conversely, with the partial exception of the Democratic Alliance (DA), opposition parties did worse, and appear stuck in a zero-sum competition amongst themselves. In terms of office, ANC popularity meant greater national power and, for the first time, control of all provinces. Further, Election 2004 revealed that the more the ANC cooperates with its alliance partners the better it does at the polls, and the more influence the Congress Of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu)/South African Communist Party (SACP) have over policy. For opposition parties this dynamic is reversed. Those parties which co-operated with the ANC to get office lost popular support, while those which eschewed office did better at the polls. In sum, while popularity and office are mutually reinforcing for the alliance, they constitute a dilemma for opposition parties. Finally, while there are signs that broader social change will pose some class-related problems for the ANC, more profound racial obstacles await opposition parties.
Representing Hamilton
(Taylor & Francis group, 2017) Piper, Laurence
In his most important book to date, Freedom is Power: Liberty Through Political Representation (2014b), Lawrence Hamilton offers what he describes as a realistic theory of freedom for modern conditions, located in the tradition of Western political thought. It is in fact both a philosophical and a theoretical argument with the former focusing on the link between freedom and power, and the latter between power and representation, as reflected in the two halves of the title of the book. Thus, in the first three chapters of Freedom is Power, Hamilton offers his reading of a longstanding and famous debate on the nature of political freedom, engaging extensively with varying liberal and republican traditions, and looking to chart a path through them inspired mostly by Marx. Most of the rest of the book, however, is focused on theorising what freedom is power would mean under contemporary conditions, starting with critical debates on power and domination, and moving to his key claim of the centrality of representation (and accountability) to real modern freedom

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