A Democratic South Africa?

A Democratic South Africa?

Author: Donald L. Horowitz

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1992-05-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780520078857

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Una reproducción digital está disponible en E -Editions, una colaboración de la Universidad de California Press y el programa eScholarship de la Biblioteca Digital de California.


The Collapse of Apartheid and the Dawn of Democracy in South Africa, 1993

The Collapse of Apartheid and the Dawn of Democracy in South Africa, 1993

Author: John C. Eby

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-04-17

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1469633175

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This game situates students in the Multiparty Negotiating Process taking place at the World Trade Center in Kempton Park in 1993. South Africa is facing tremendous social anxiety and violence. The object of the talks, and of the game, is to reach consensus for a constitution that will guide a post-apartheid South Africa. The country has immense racial diversity--white, black, Colored, Indian. For the negotiations, however, race turns out to be less critical than cultural, economic, and political diversity. Students are challenged to understand a complex landscape and to navigate a surprising web of alliances. The game focuses on the problem of transitioning a society conditioned to profound inequalities and harsh political repression into a more democratic, egalitarian system. Students will ponder carefully the meaning of democracy as a concept and may find that justice and equality are not always comfortable partners with liberty. While for the majority of South Africans, universal suffrage was a symbol of new democratic beginnings, it seemed to threaten the lives, families, and livelihoods of minorities and parties outside the African National Congress coalition. These deep tensions in the nature of democracy pose important questions about the character of justice and the best mechanisms for reaching national decisions. Free supplementary materials for this textbook are available at the Reacting to the Past website. Visit https://reacting.barnard.edu/instructor-resources, click on the RTTP Game Library link, and create a free account to download what is available.


Constitutional Options for a Democratic South Africa

Constitutional Options for a Democratic South Africa

Author: Ziyad Motala

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780882581873

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Constitutional Options for a Democratic South Africa describes the unjust South African political and judicial apartheid system that exploited black South Africans. Ziyad Motala emphasizes the importance of a constitution and state system that would not only ameliorate the enormous inequalities generated by colonialism and apartheid but also ensure equal democratic rights and protection to all citizens in the post-apartheid South Africa. He carefully examines and compares the political outcomes of post-independent African states adopting (1) the Western liberal federal state, (2) the Soviet-inspired Marxist unitary state, or (3) the locally inspired one-party African socialist state. Motala weighs the relative merits of these state structures for dealing with the complex of democracy, socioeconomic development, and national unity in multiethnic states. He contends that the constitutions and state practices employed thus far by African states have not facilitated political and socioeconomic development, and recommends different constitutional and state options for South Africa.


Democratic Liberalism in South Africa

Democratic Liberalism in South Africa

Author: Jeffrey Butler

Publisher: Wesleyan

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9780819561978

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Essays by South African liberals describe the history of their movement, the history of their nation, an analysis of South African politics, and hopes for democratic reform


The Politics of Necessity

The Politics of Necessity

Author: Elke Zuern

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2011-02-12

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 029925013X

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The end of apartheid in South Africa broke down political barriers, extending to all races the formal rights of citizenship, including the right to participate in free elections and parliamentary democracy. But South Africa remains one of the most economically polarized nations in the world. In The Politics of Necessity Elke Zuern forcefully argues that working toward greater socio-economic equality—access to food, housing, land, jobs—is crucial to achieving a successful and sustainable democracy. Drawing on interviews with local residents and activists in South Africa’s impoverished townships during more than a decade of dramatic political change, Zuern tracks the development of community organizing and reveals the shifting challenges faced by poor citizens. Under apartheid, township residents began organizing to press the government to address the basic material necessities of the poor and expanded their demands to include full civil and political rights. While the movement succeeded in gaining formal political rights, democratization led to a new government that instituted neo-liberal economic reforms and sought to minimize protest. In discouraging dissent and failing to reduce economic inequality, South Africa’s new democracy has continued to disempower the poor. By comparing movements in South Africa to those in other African and Latin American states, this book identifies profound challenges to democratization. Zuern asserts the fundamental indivisibility of all human rights, showing how protest movements that call attention to socio-economic demands, though often labeled a threat to democracy, offer significant opportunities for modern democracies to evolve into systems of rule that empower all citizens.


History After Apartheid

History After Apartheid

Author: Annie E. Coombes

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2003-11-24

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780822330721

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DIVHow should post-apartheid South Africa present its history - in museums, monuments, and parks./div


Women's Organizations and Democracy in South Africa

Women's Organizations and Democracy in South Africa

Author: Shireen Hassim

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2006-06-26

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0299213838

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The transition to democracy in South Africa was one of the defining events in twentieth-century political history. The South African women’s movement is one of the most celebrated on the African continent. Shireen Hassim examines interactions between the two as she explores the gendered nature of liberation and regime change. Her work reveals how women’s political organizations both shaped and were shaped by the broader democratic movement. Alternately asserting their political independence and giving precedence to the democratic movement as a whole, women activists proved flexible and remarkably successful in influencing policy. At the same time, their feminism was profoundly shaped by the context of democratic and nationalist ideologies. In reading the last twenty-five years of South African history through a feminist framework, Hassim offers fresh insights into the interactions between civil society, political parties, and the state. Hassim boldly confronts sensitive issues such as the tensions between autonomy and political dependency in feminists’ engagement with the African National Congress (ANC) and other democratic movements, and black-white relations within women’s organizations. She offers a historically informed discussion of the challenges facing feminist activists during a time of nationalist struggle and democratization. Winner, Victoria Schuck Award for best book on women and politics, American Political Science Association “An exceptional study, based on extensive research. . . . Highly recommended.”—Choice “A rich history of women’s organizations in South African . . . . [Hassim] had observed at first hand, and often participated in, much of what she described. She had access to the informants and private archives that so enliven the narrative and enrich the analysis. She provides a finely balanced assessment.”—Gretchen Bauer, African Studies Review


Political Parties in South Africa

Political Parties in South Africa

Author: Thuynsma, Heather

Publisher: Africa Institute of South Africa

Published: 2017-11-28

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13: 0798305142

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Political parties and the party system that underpins South Africa’s democracy have the potential to build a cohesive and prosperous nation. But in the past few years the ANC’s dominance has strained the system and tested it and its institutions’ fortitude. There are deeper issues of accountability that often spurn the Constitution and there is also a clear need to foster meaningful public participation and transparency. This volume offers a different and detailed assessment of the health of South Africa’s political system. This study intends to unravel the condition of the party system in South Africa and culminates in the question: Do South African parties promote or hinder democracy in the country? The areas of the party system that are known to require continued work are the weakness of democratic structures within parties, the perceived lack of responsibility of elected parliamentarians towards voters, non-transparent private partner financing structures and a lack of attractiveness of party-political commitment, especially for women. Experts in the respective fields address all of these areas in this book.


From Apartheid to Democracy

From Apartheid to Democracy

Author: Katherine Elizabeth Mack

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-06-18

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0271066385

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South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings can be considered one of the most significant rhetorical events of the late twentieth century. The TRC called language into action, tasking it with promoting understanding among a divided people and facilitating the construction of South Africa’s new democracy. Other books on the TRC and deliberative rhetoric in contemporary South Africa emphasize the achievement of reconciliation during and in the immediate aftermath of the transition from apartheid. From Apartheid to Democracy, in contrast, considers the varied, complex, and enduring effects of the Commission’s rhetorical wager. It is the first book-length study to analyze the TRC through such a lens. Katherine Elizabeth Mack focuses on the dissension and negotiations over difference provoked by the Commission’s process, especially its public airing of victims’ and perpetrators’ truths. She tracks agonistic deliberation (evidenced in the TRC’s public hearings) into works of fiction and photography that extend and challenge the Commission’s assumptions about truth, healing, and reconciliation. Ultimately, Mack demonstrates that while the TRC may not have achieved all of its political goals, its very existence generated valuable deliberation within and beyond its official process.


The Black and White Rainbow

The Black and White Rainbow

Author: Carolyn Holmes

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0472127179

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Nation-building imperatives compel citizens to focus on what makes them similar and what binds them together, forgetting what makes them different. Democratic institution building, on the other hand, requires fostering opposition through conducting multiparty elections and encouraging debate. Leaders of democratic factions, like parties or interest groups, can consolidate their power by emphasizing difference. But when held in tension, these two impulses—toward remembering difference and forgetting it, between focusing on unity and encouraging division—are mutually constitutive of sustainable democracy. ​Based on ethnographic and interview-based fieldwork conducted in 2012–13, The Black and White Rainbow: Reconciliation, Opposition, and Nation-Building in Democratic South Africa explores various themes of nation- and democracy-building, including the emotional and banal content of symbols of the post-apartheid state, the ways that gender and race condition nascent nationalism, the public performance of nationalism and other group-based identities, integration and sharing of space, language diversity, and the role of democratic functioning including party politics and modes of opposition. Each of these thematic chapters aims to explicate a feature of the multifaceted nature of identity-building, and link the South African case to broader literatures on both nationalism and democracy.