Violence, Inequality and Transformation: Apartheid Survivors on South Africa's Ongoing Transition
Violence, Inequality and Transformation: Apartheid Survivors on South Africa's Ongoing Transition

Author: Jasmina Brankovic

Publisher: DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Human Development

Published: 2020-01-29

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0639844014

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Despite its lauded political transition in 1994, South Africa continues to have among the highest levels of violence and inequality in the world. Organised survivors of apartheid violations have long maintained that we cannot adequately address violence in the country, let alone achieve full democracy, without addressing inequality. This book is built around extensive quotes from members of Khulumani Support Group, the apartheid survivors' social movement, and young people growing up in Khulumani families. It shows how these survivors, who bridge the past and the present through their activism, understand and respond to socioeconomic drivers of violence. Pointing to the continuities between apartheid oppression and post-apartheid marginalisation in everyday life, the narratives detail ways in which the democratic dispensation has strengthened barriers to social transformation and helped enable violence. They also present strategies for effecting change through collaboration, dialogue and mutual training and through partnerships with diverse stakeholders that build on local-level knowledge and community-based initiatives. The lens of violence offers new and manageable ways to think about reducing inequality, while the lens of inequality shows that violence is a complex web of causes, pathways and effects that requires a big-picture approach to unravel. The survivors' narratives suggest innovative strategies for promoting a just transition through people-driven transformation that go well beyond the constraints of South Africa's transitional justice practice to date. A result of participatory research conducted in collaboration with and by Khulumani members, this book will be of interest to activists, students, researchers and policy makers working on issues of transitional justice, inequality and violence.

Violence, Inequality and Transformation
Violence, Inequality and Transformation

Author: Jasmina Brankovic

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 9780639844008

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Despite its lauded political transition in 1994, South Africa continues to have among the highest levels of violence and inequality in the world. Organised survivors of apartheid violations have long maintained that we cannot adequately address violence in the country, let alone achieve full democracy, without addressing inequality. This book is built around extensive quotes from members of Khulumani Support Group, the apartheid survivors’ social movement, and young people growing up in Khulumani families. It shows how these survivors, who bridge the past and the present through their activism, understand and respond to socioeconomic drivers of violence. Pointing to the continuities between apartheid oppression and post-apartheid marginalisation in everyday life, the narratives detail ways in which the democratic dispensation has strengthened barriers to social transformation and helped enable violence. They also present strategies for effecting change through collaboration, dialogue and mutual training and through partnerships with diverse stakeholders that build on local-level knowledge and community-based initiatives. The lens of violence offers new and manageable ways to think about reducing inequality, while the lens of inequality shows that violence is a complex web of causes, pathways and effects that requires a big-picture approach to unravel. The survivors’ narratives suggest innovative strategies for promoting a just transition through people-driven transformation that go well beyond the constraints of South Africa’s transitional justice practice to date. A result of participatory research conducted in collaboration with and by Khulumani members, this book will be of interest to activists, students, researchers and policy makers working on issues of transitional justice, inequality and violence.

The Limits of Transition: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 20 Years on
The Limits of Transition: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 20 Years on

Author: Mia Swart

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-08-28

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9004339566

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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.

Advocating Transitional Justice in Africa
Advocating Transitional Justice in Africa

Author: Jasmina Brankovic

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-01-30

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 3319704176

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This edited volume examines the role of local civil society in shaping understandings and processes of transitional justice in Africa – a nursery of transitional justice ideas for well over two decades. It brings together practitioners and scholars with intimate knowledge of these processes to evaluate the agendas and strategies of local civil society, and offers an opportunity to reflect on ‘lessons learnt’ along the way. The contributors focus on the evolution and effectiveness of transitional justice interventions, providing a glimpse into the motivations and inner workings of major civil society actors. The book presents an African perspective on transitional justice through a compilation of country-specific and thematic analyses of agenda setting and lobbying efforts. It offers insights into state–civil society relations on the continent, which shape these agendas. The chapters present case studies from Southern, Central, East, West and North Africa, and a range of moments and types of transition. In addition to historical perspective, the chapters provide fresh and up-to- date analyses of ongoing transitional justice efforts that are key to defining the future of how the field is understood globally, in theory and in practice Endorsements: "This great volume of written work – Advocating Transitional Justice in Africa: The Role of Civil Society – does what virtually no other labor of the intellect has done heretofore. Authored by movement activists and thinkers in the fields of human rights and transitional justice, the volume wrestles with the complex place and roles of transitional justice in the project of societal reconstruction in Africa. ... This volume will serve as a timely and thought-provoking guide for activists, thinkers, and policy makers – as well as students of transitional justice – interested in the tension between the universal and the particular in the arduous struggle for liberation. Often, civil society actors in Africa have been accused of consuming the ideas of others, but not producing enough, if any, of their own. This volume makes clear the spuriousness of this claim and firmly plants an African flag in the field of ideas." Makau Mutua

Insurgent Citizenship
Insurgent Citizenship

Author: James Holston

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1400832780

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Insurgent citizenships have arisen in cities around the world. This book examines the insurgence of democratic citizenship in the urban peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, its entanglement with entrenched systems of inequality, and its contradiction in violence. James Holston argues that for two centuries Brazilians have practiced a type of citizenship all too common among nation-states--one that is universally inclusive in national membership and massively inegalitarian in distributing rights and in its legalization of social differences. But since the 1970s, he shows, residents of Brazil's urban peripheries have formulated a new citizenship that is destabilizing the old. Their mobilizations have developed not primarily through struggles of labor but through those of the city--particularly illegal residence, house building, and land conflict. Yet precisely as Brazilians democratized urban space and achieved political democracy, violence, injustice, and impunity increased dramatically. Based on comparative, ethnographic, and historical research, Insurgent Citizenship reveals why the insurgent and the entrenched remain dangerously conjoined as new kinds of citizens expand democracy even as new forms of violence and exclusion erode it. Rather than view this paradox as evidence of democratic failure and urban chaos, Insurgent Citizenship argues that contradictory realizations of citizenship characterize all democracies--emerging and established. Focusing on processes of city- and citizen-making now prevalent globally, it develops new approaches for understanding the contemporary course of democratic citizenship in societies of vastly different cultures and histories.

The Global Climate Regime and Transitional Justice
The Global Climate Regime and Transitional Justice

Author: Sonja Klinsky

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-27

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 1351854917

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Geopolitical changes combined with the increasing urgency of ambitious climate action have re-opened debates about justice and international climate policy. Mechanisms and insights from transitional justice have been used in over thirty countries across a range of conflicts at the interface of historical responsibility and imperatives for collective futures. However, lessons from transitional justice theory and practice have not been systematically explored in the climate context. The comparison gives rise to new ideas and strategies that help address climate change dilemmas. This book examines the potential of transitional justice insights to inform global climate governance. It lays out core structural similarities between current global climate governance tensions and transitional justice contexts. It explores how transitional justice approaches and mechanisms could be productively applied in the climate change context. These include responsibility mechanisms such as amnesties, legal accountability measures, and truth commissions, as well as reparations and institutional reform. The book then steps beyond reformist transitional justice practice to consider more transformative approaches, and uses this to explore a wider set of possibilities for the climate context. Each chapter presents one or more concrete proposals arrived at by using ideas from transitional justice and applying them to the justice tensions central to the global climate context. By combining these two fields the book provides a new framework through which to understand the challenges of addressing harms and strengthening collective climate action. This book will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners of climate change and transitional justice.

Democracy's Infrastructure
Democracy's Infrastructure

Author: Antina von Schnitzler

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-11-08

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0691170789

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In the past decade, South Africa's "miracle transition" has been interrupted by waves of protests in relation to basic services such as water and electricity. Less visibly, the post-apartheid period has witnessed widespread illicit acts involving infrastructure, including the nonpayment of service charges, the bypassing of metering devices, and illegal connections to services. Democracy’s Infrastructure shows how such administrative links to the state became a central political terrain during the antiapartheid struggle and how this terrain persists in the post-apartheid present. Focusing on conflicts surrounding prepaid water meters, Antina von Schnitzler examines the techno-political forms through which democracy takes shape. Von Schnitzler explores a controversial project to install prepaid water meters in Soweto—one of many efforts to curb the nonpayment of service charges that began during the antiapartheid struggle—and she traces how infrastructure, payment, and technical procedures become sites where citizenship is mediated and contested. She follows engineers, utility officials, and local bureaucrats as they consider ways to prompt Sowetans to pay for water, and she shows how local residents and activists wrestle with the constraints imposed by meters. This investigation of democracy from the perspective of infrastructure reframes the conventional story of South Africa’s transition, foregrounding the less visible remainders of apartheid and challenging readers to think in more material terms about citizenship and activism in the postcolonial world. Democracy’s Infrastructure examines how seemingly mundane technological domains become charged territory for struggles over South Africa’s political transformation.

From Transitional to Transformative Justice
From Transitional to Transformative Justice

Author: Paul Gready

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-02-21

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1108668577

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Transitional justice has become the principle lens used by countries emerging from conflict and authoritarian rule to address the legacies of violence and serious human rights abuses. However, as transitional justice practice becomes more institutionalized with support from NGOs and funding from Western donors, questions have been raised about the long-term effectiveness of transitional justice mechanisms. Core elements of the paradigm have been subjected to sustained critique, yet there is much less commentary that goes beyond critique to set out, in a comprehensive fashion, what an alternative approach might look like. This volume discusses one such alternative, transformative justice, and positions this quest in the wider context of ongoing fall-out from the 2008 global economic and political crisis, as well as the failure of social justice advocates to respond with imagination and ambition. Drawing on diverse perspectives, contributors illustrate the wide-ranging purchase of transformative justice at both conceptual and empirical levels.

Love and Courage
Love and Courage

Author: Pregs Govender

Publisher: Jacana Media

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9781770093423

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This book offers a refreshing vision of true power, both personal and political, based on the love and courage within each of us. Told with spirit and humor, this book draws on the story of her life beginning with her childhood in Durban, a life that has often involved insurbodination to the powers that be.