The Role of Political Violence in South Africa's Democratisation PDF Download

Author: Ran Greenstein
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Author: Merete Bech Seeberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429638205
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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This comprehensive volume brings together a diverse set of scholars to analyse candidate nomination, intra-party democracy, and election violence in Africa. Through a combination of comparative studies and country-specific case studies spanning much of Sub-Saharan Africa, including Kenya, Zambia, and South Africa, the authors shed light on violence during candidate nomination processes within political parties. The book covers several cases that vary significantly in terms of democracy, party dominance and competitiveness, and the institutionalization and inclusiveness of candidate selection processes. The authors investigate how common violence is during candidate nomination processes; whether the drivers of nomination violence are identical to those of general election violence; whether nomination violence can be avoided in high risk cases such as dominant party regimes with fierce intra-party competition for power; and which subnational locations are most likely to experience nomination violence. Through its focus on violence in nomination processes, this book firmly places the role of political parties at the centre of the analysis of African election violence. While adding to our theoretical and empirical understanding of nomination violence, the book contributes to the literature on conflict, the literature on democratization and democratic consolidation, and the literature on African political parties. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Democratization.

Author: Aletta J. Norval
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349268011
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
South Africa in Transition utilises new theoretical perspectives to describe and explain central dimensions of the democratic transition in South Africa during the late 1980s and early 1990s, covering changes in the politics of gender and education, the political discourses of the ANC, NP and the white right, constructions of identity in South Africa's black townships and rural areas, the role of political violence in the transition, and accounts of the democratization process itself.

Author: Andre du Toit
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349210749
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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This book provides a unique perspective, at once scholarly and fully engaged, on the political violence in South Africa during 'The Time of the Comrades' in the mid-1980s. The work of a group of social scientists and professionals, whose own work and thinking have been profoundly affected by the political crisis of that time, it provides an in-depth research and analysis as well as critical reflections on the difficult political and theoretical issues raised by political violence and the struggle in South Africa.

Author: Martin Legassick
Publisher: Nordic Africa Institute
ISBN: 9789171065049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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The impact of the concept(s) of armed struggle for the notion(s) of democracy in South(ern) Africa is the focus of this paper. Originally submitted to a conference on (Re-) Conceptualising Democracy and Liberation in Southern Africa, held in Windhoek, Namibia during July 2002, it argues from the point of departure of the personal involvement of the author in the issues raised.The author was part of a group which criticised the strategy of armed struggle in the ANC. With this paper he inspires a debate, which can claim relevance for current issues of democracy in South Africa and the Southern African region more generally. Given the degree of personal involvement of its author, this analysis is contemporary history based on personal insights, and provides arguments for a necessary discussion.

Author: Timothy Sisk
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400887399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Timothy Sisk presents a new way of conceiving the transition to democracy in South Africa. Unlike authors such as Horowitz and Lijphart, who have sought to prescribe an ideal set of post-apartheid political institutions, Sisk asks what kinds of institutions show signs of actually emerging, given recent history and present realities. He treats the problem of constructing a democratic post-apartheid society in South Africa as part of a larger condition common to societies deeply divided by ethnic, religious, racial, or national discord. Though its profound cleavages of race and class make it a "least likely" candidate for conflict resolution through democratization, Sisk argues that the centripetal pull on moderate politicians of all parties was greater than the seemingly natural polarizing trend in a divided society. This centripetal pull led to the adoption of an interim constitution in 1993 after protracted negotiations. An American Fulbright scholar sent to South Africa after the end of the 21-year rupture of official scholarly exchanges between the two countries, Sisk analyzes the changes in the strategic calculations of the white minority government, the black liberation movement, and other parties over the course of negotiations since 1990. He concludes that intermittent upsurges of violence often reinforced, rather than reduced, the incentives of leaders on both sides to negotiate a settlement that would avoid mutually damaging outcomes. Drawing on extensive interviews with political figures, as well as other primary and secondary sources, Sisk finds reason for hope that a democratic social contract can evolve, balancing majority rule with minority representation and guaranteeing equal economic opportunity and social justice. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author: Hennie P. P. Lötter
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042002746
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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This book argues that the secret to the political miracle achieved in South Africa is a comprehensive change in the conception of justice as guiding political institutions. Pursuing justice is a moral imperative that has practical value as a cost-efficient way of dealing with conflict. This case study in applied ethics and social theory patiently explains how justice in the new South Africa restores humanity and establishes lasting peace, whereas injustice in apartheid South Africa led to conflict and dehumanization.

Author: Roger Southall
Publisher: Taylor & Francis US
ISBN: 9780714681733
Category : Democracy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Nelson Mandela's African National Congress won an overwhelming victory in South Africa's liberation election and repeated that triumph when the electorate went back to the polls in 1999. Whilst testifying to the enduring popularity of the ANC, these results have precipitated an emergent debate about the quality of the country's hard won democracy. In particular, a critique of the new government's performance in office has developed around the notion of the ANC as a "dominant party", one of which for demographic, historical and social reasons is unlikely to be displaced from power in an election for the forseeable future. This has led, in turn, to key questions about the role of the political parties of opposition. The debate about the ANC's dominance therefore becomes a debate about whether democracy in South Africa is just formal or whether it is real.

Author: Gail Super
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317125495
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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This book deals with the historic transition to democracy in South Africa and its impact upon crime and punishment. It examines how the problem of crime has emerged as a major issue to be governed in post-apartheid South Africa. Having undergone a dramatic transition from authoritarianism to democracy, from a white minority to black majority government, South Africa provides rich material on the role that political authority, and challenges to it, play in the construction of crime and criminality. As such, the study is about the socio-cultural and political significance of crime and punishment in the context of a change of regime. The work uses the South African case study to examine a question of wider interest, namely the politics of punishment and race in neoliberalizing regimes. It provides interesting and illuminating empirical material to the broader debate on crime control in post-welfare/neoliberalizing/post transition polities.

Author: Nicholas Rush Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190847204
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Despite being one of the world's most vibrant democracies, police estimate between five and ten percent of the murders in South Africa result from vigilante violence. This is puzzling given the country's celebrated transition to democracy and massive reform of the state's legal institutions. Where most studies explain vigilantism as a response to state or civic failure, in Contradictions of Democracy, Nicholas Rush Smith illustrates that vigilantism is actually a response to the processes of democratic state formation. In the context of densely networked neighborhoods, vigilante citizens often interpret the technical success of legal institutions-for instance, the arrest and subsequent release of suspects on bail-as failure and work to correct such perceived failures on their own. Smith also shows that vigilantism provides a new lens through which to understand democratic state formation. Among young men of color in some parts of South Africa, fear of extra-judicial police violence is common. Amid such fear, instead of the state seeming protective, it can appear as something akin to a massive vigilante organization. An insightful look into the high rates of vigilantism in South Africa and the general challenges of democratic state building, Contradictions of Democracy explores fundamental questions about political order, the rule of law, and democratic citizenship.