Refusal, Transition and Post-apartheid Law under editorship of professor Karin van Marle is indeed long overdue. As some of the authors in the relevant contributions to this publication rightly point out, Van Marle?s call for a ?jurisprudence of generosity?, enabled through an ?ethics of refusal?, signals a new shift in South African jurisprudence. Through the lens of Van Marle?s ethics of refusal and her jurisprudence of generosity, the articles present fresh and meaningful interpretations in respect of a range of very relevant topics ranging from property theory and a rethinking of human rights, to the role of forgiveness and the dangers inherent in modern technology.
About the publication This volume of essays, A life interrupted: essays in honour of the lives and legacies of Christof Heyns, honours Christof Heyns, renowned human rights lawyer, advocate, activist and educator, but also down-to-earth family man, friend and colleague. Christof’s sudden and most untimely passing on 28 March 2021 deeply saddened those close to him but also evinced an outpouring of grief from the national and international human rights community. His passing brought a deep sense of loss, in part because, at age 62, he was fully engaged in contributing to the betterment of society and still had so much more to give. His is a life interrupted. But at the same time, looking back over the varied lives he lived, he had already left his mark in so many ways. His influences and impacts are manifold and magical. This collection not only testifies to the legacy that he has left us, but also to the ongoing efforts of many to continue building on his legacy. This collection contains two sets of essays by family members, friends, colleagues, collaborators and students. Part A contains essays of a more reflective and personal nature, while the contributions in Part B link to the scholarly or academic themes Christof had worked on and explored, including international human rights systems, international law, the right to life, freedom of association, international humanitarian law, the impact of human rights treaties, constitutionalism and legal philosophy. However, a neat distinction between the personal and professional is not possible in respect of such a warm, generous and enthusiastic person as Christof. Most of the essays in Part A integrate some of Christof’s professional and academic achievements, while many of the essays in Part B also reflect on Christof as a person. The editors, all based at the Faculty of Law, UP, are colleagues and friends who worked closely with Christof. Frans Viljoen succeeded Christof as Director of the Centre for Human Rights. Christof was his doctoral supervisor, mentor and research collaborator. Charles Fombad worked with Christof at ICLA, and took over as ICLA Director after Christof’s passing. Dire Tladi, an ICLA fellow, had his office just across from Christof in ICLA. As member of the International Law Commission, he shared with Christof high level engagement with the UN. While Christof served on the Human Rights Committee, his colleague Ann Skelton serves on the Committee on the Rights of the Child. Magnus Killander worked closely with Christof as co-author and co-editor. Christof was also his doctoral supervisor. The publication date of this book is 10 January 2022, which is the date marking 63 years since Christof’s birth. The publisher is the Pretoria University Law Press (PULP), of which Christof was also a founder.
This curated collection engages international debates about the current challenges facing democracy. Given the proliferation of “crisis” literature on democracy, this volume finds its distinctive niche in presenting perspectives from the global margins that bridge disciplinary, sectoral, national and conceptual divides. South Africans enter into conversation with scholars and activists from elsewhere in the Global South, including the Arab world and the rest of Africa, and from the European periphery. Insights on democracy are offered from a diversity of perspectives and voices, spanning philosophy, socio-legal and political studies, sociology, public administration, and queer and gender studies and activism. The book will be of interest to academics, activists, policymakers, development planners, and the general public. The D-Word is a timely contribution addressing burning questions: are current contestations about the relevance of democracy due to systemic flaws in how it is constituted, received, practised and even imagined, and can the democratic “project” be salvaged? The book’s unique approach brings a variety of lenses to bear on the prospects for democracy. The critical reflections it contains make for an enriching, broad canvas of ideas. - Professor Sandy Africa, University of Pretoria
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a noble attempt to begin to address the continuing traumatic legacy of Apartheid. This interdisciplinary collection critiques the work of the TRC 20 years since its establishment. Taking the paralysing political and social crises of the mid-1990s in South Africa as starting point, the book contains a collection of responses to the TRC that considers the notions of crisis, judgment and social justice. It asks whether the current political and social crises in South Africa are linked to the country’s post-apartheid transitional mechanisms, specifically, the TRC. The fact that the material conditions of the lives of many Apartheid victims have not improved, forms a major theme of the book. Collectively, the book considers the ‘unfinished business’ of the TRC.
Many critical theorists talk and write about the day after the revolution, but few have actually participated in the constitution of a revolutionary government. Emeritus Justice Albie Sachs was a freedom fighter for most of his life. He then played a major role in the negotiating committee for the new constitution of South Africa, and was subsequently appointed to the new Constitutional Court of South Africa. Therefore, the question of what it means to make the transition from a freedom fighter to a participant in a revolutionary government is not abstract, in Hegel’s sense of the word, it is an actual journey that Albie Sachs undertook. The essays in this book raise the complex question of what it actually means to make this transition without selling out to the demands of realism. In addition, the preface written by Emeritus Justice Albie Sachs and his interview with Drucilla Cornell and Karin van Marle, further address key questions about revolution in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries: from armed struggle to the organization of a nation state committed to ethical transformation in the name of justice. Albie Sachs and transformation in South Africa: from revolutionary activist to constitutional court judge illuminates the theoretical and practical experiences of revolution and its political aftermath. With first-hand accounts alongside academic interrogation, this unique book will intrigue anyone interested in the intersection of Law and Politics.
This book argues that South Africa is haunted by the spectre of reparation. The failure of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to secure adequate reparation for the victims of colonisation and apartheid continues to drastically undermine the commission’s processes and legacy. Investigating the TRC’s key processes of amnesty, archiving and forgiveness in turn, the book demonstrates that each process is fundamentally thwarted by the terminal lack of reparation. These multiple forms of the spectre of reparation haunt post-apartheid society in deeply traumatogenic ways. The book proposes a new ethic of "reparative citizenship" as a means of encountering the spectres of reparation in a productive and transformative manner, generating hope even in the face of the irreparable. This book will be an important read for South Africans interested in overcoming the impasses and injustices that haunt the country, but it will also be of interest to post-conflict transitional justice and politics researchers more broadly.
As lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex identities increasingly secure legal recognition across the globe, these formal equality gains are contradicted by the continued presence of violence. Such violence emerges as a political pressure point for contestations of identity and power within wider systems of global and local inequality. Discourses of homophobia-related violence constitute subjectivities that enact violence and that are rendered vulnerable to it, as well as shaping political possibilities to act against violence. Blackwashing Homophobia critiques prevailing discourses through which violence and its queer targets are normatively understood, exploring the knowledge regimes in which multiple forms of othering are both reproduced and/or resisted. This book draws on primary research on lesbian subjectivity and violence in South Africa examining the intersections of sexual, gender, race and class identities, and the contemporary politics of violence in a postcolonial context: • What are the contending ways of knowing queers and the violence they face? • How are the causes, characters, consequence of, and ‘cures’ for, violence constructed through such knowledges and what are their power effects? The book explores these questions and their implications for how violence, as an instrument of power, might be countered. Blackwashing Homophobia is a timely intervention for theorising the discourse of homophobia-related violence and what it reveals and conceals, enables and hinders, in relation to queer identities and political imaginaries in times of violence. The book’s interdisciplinary approach to the topic will appeal to social and political scientists, philosophers and psychology professionals, as well as to advanced psychology undergraduates and postgraduates alike.
This book explores the nexus between natural resources ownership and the right to development in Africa. The right to sovereignty over natural resources and the right to development are recognised and protected in an extensive framework of international, regional and domestic instruments. They guarantee people's entitlement to fully and freely utilise their natural resources as a means of subsistence and for economic, social and cultural development. Yet, despite the abundance of natural resources in Africa a majority of the people on the continent remain largely impoverished. This book articulates the central argument that to achieve the right to development in Africa requires appropriate governance of the continent’s natural resources to which the people of Africa are guaranteed sovereign ownership. With case study illustrations from Zimbabwe, Ghana, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, chapters explore the normative measures, specific guarantees and community entitlements to natural resources for the realisation of the right to development. The book will be an invaluable guide to scholars and postgraduate students of Natural Resources, Development and African studies as well as policymakers and practitioners in these areas.
This book considers the question of spatial justice after apartheid from several disciplinary perspectives – jurisprudence, law, literature, architecture, photography and psychoanalysis are just some of the disciplines engaged here. However, the main theoretical device on which the authors comment is the legacy of what in Carl Schmitt’s terms is nomos as the spatialised normativity of sociality. Each author considers within the practical and theoretical constraints of their topic, the question of what nomos in its modern configuration may or may not contribute to a thinking of spatial justice after apartheid. On the whole, the collection forces a confrontation between law’s spatiality in a “postcolonial” era, on the one hand, and the traumatic legacy of what Paul Gilroy has called the “colonial nomos”, on the other hand. In the course of this confrontation, critical questions of continuation, extension, disruption and rewriting are raised and confronted in novel and innovative ways that both challenge Schmitt’s account of nomos and affirm the centrality of the constitutive relation between law and space. The book promises to resituate the trajectory of nomos, while considering critical instances through which the spatial legacy of apartheid might at last be overcome. This interdisciplinary book will appeal to scholars of critical legal theory, political philosophy, aesthetics and architecture.
The relation between law and revolution is one of the most pressing questions of our time. As one country after another has faced the challenge that comes with the revolutionary overthrow of past dictatorships, how one reconstructs a new government is a burning issue. South Africa, after a long and bloody armed struggle and a series of militant uprisings, negotiated a settlement for a new government and remains an important example of what a substantive revolution might look like. The essays collected in this book address both the broader question of law and revolution and some of the specific issues of transformation in South Africa.
