Focusing on South Africa during the period 1650–2000, this book examines the role of law in making democracy work in changing societies. The Legacies of Law sheds light on the neglected relationship ...between path dependence and the law. Meierhenrich argues that legal norms and institutions, even illiberal ones, have an important - and hitherto undertheorized - structuring effect on democratic outcomes. Under certain conditions, law appears to reduce uncertainty in democratization by invoking common cultural backgrounds and experiences. In instances where interacting adversaries share qua law reasonably convergent mental models, transitions from authoritarian rule are shown to be less intractable. Meierhenrich's historical analysis of the evolution of law - and its effects - in South Africa during the period 1650–2000, compared with a short study of Chile from 1830–1990, shows how, and when, legal norms and institutions serve as historical causes to both liberal and illiberal rule.
Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africais an account of the community development programs of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa. It covers ...the emergence of the movement's ideas and practices in the context of the late 1960s and early 1970s, then analyzes how activists refined their practices, mobilized resources, and influenced people through their work. The book examines this history primarily through the Black Community Programs organization and its three major projects: the yearbook Black Review, the Zanempilo Community Health Center, and the Njwaxa leatherwork factory. As opposed to better-known studies of antipolitical, macroeconomic initiatives, this book shows that people from the so-called global South led development in innovative ways that promised to increase social and political participation. It particularly explores the power that youth, women, and churches had in leading change in a hostile political environment. With this new perspective on a major liberation movement, Hadfield not only causes us to rethink aspects of African history but also offers lessons from the past for African societies still dealing with developmental challenges similar to those faced during apartheid.
This fresh interpretation of apartheid South Africa integrates histories of resistance with the analysis of power - asking not only why apartheid was defeated, but how it came to survive for so long.
The embrace of socio-economic rights in South Africa has featured prominently in scholarship on constitution making, legal jurisprudence and social mobilisation. But the development has attracted ...critics who claim that this turn to rights has not generated social transformation in practice. This book sets out to assess one part of the puzzle and asks what has been the role and impact of socio-economic strategies used by civil society actors. Focusing on a range of socio-economic rights and national trends in law and political economy, the book's authors show how socio-economic rights have influenced the development of civil society discourse and action. The evidence suggests that some strategies have achieved material and political impact but this is conditional on the nature of the claim, degree of mobilisation and alliance building, and underlying constraints.
As an Advocate of the Supreme Court, John Dugard observes the South African legal order daily in operation. In this book he provides a thorough description and probing analysis of the workings of the ...system. He places South Africa's legal order in a comparative context, examining the climate of legal opinion, crucial judicial decisions, and their significance in relation to contemporary thought and practice in England, America, and elsewhere. He also considers South Africa's laws in the light of its history, politics, and culture.
Originally published in 1978.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback 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.
The perception of a global crisis of groundwater over-abstraction and pollution is assumed to include Sub-Saharan Africa, a region where groundwater resources are on average greatly under-utilized. ...This perception of crisis contributes to a “discourse of shortage” which in turn has led to a neglect of the potential role of groundwater to support irrigation, water security and economic growth and is underpinned by beliefs about the availability of the resource itself. However, examples from southern Africa suggest that it is the absence of the services needed to support groundwater development (including energy, drilling and pumping equipment, hard and soft infrastructure, physical access, finance and credit, and institutional support) that are the real constraint. These are likely to be more important than average hydrogeological potential in determining the viability of groundwater supplies, and examples suggest that when these factors are in place, higher-yielding sources tend to be found and developed. Rather than consider the interlinkages between these elements, a discourse of shortage in Sub-Saharan Africa appears to take precedence. Sub-genres including the village-level discourse, the transboundary discourse, and the sustainability discourse are also identified, and these are likely to reinforce the idea of shortage. The policy impact of these more dominant narratives may retard progress towards a much-needed structural change in economic activity enabled by increased agricultural production, resilience and water security.
In this book, France's leading medical anthropologist takes on one of the most tragic stories of the global AIDS crisis—the failure of the ANC government to stem the tide of the AIDS epidemic in ...South Africa. Didier Fassin traces the deep roots of the AIDS crisis to apartheid and, before that, to the colonial period.
To Swim with Crocodiles: Land, Violence, and Belonging in South Africa, 1800-1996offers a fresh perspective on the history of rural politics in South Africa, from the rise of the Zulu kingdom to the ...civil war at the dawn of democracy in KwaZulu-Natal. The book shows how Africans in the Table Mountain region drew on the cultural inheritance ofukukhonza-a practice of affiliation that binds together chiefs and subjects-to seek social and physical security in times of war and upheaval. Grounded in a rich combination of archival sources and oral interviews, this book examines relations within and between chiefdoms to bring wider concerns of African studies into focus, including land, violence, chieftaincy, ethnic and nationalist politics, and development. Colonial indirect rule, segregation, and apartheid attempted to fix formerly fluid polities into territorial "tribes" and ethnic identities, but the Zulu practice ofukukhonzamaintained its flexibility and endured. By exploring what Zulu men and women knew about and how they rememberedukukhonza, Kelly reveals how Africans envisioned and defined relationships with the land, their chiefs, and their neighbors as white minority rule transformed the countryside and local institutions of governance.
ìRainbowsî dissects the South African ìmiracleî across a vast landscape from the shack settlements of Marikana to the highest levels of government and corporate behaviour in the South Africa mining ...industry. It sets out what we know about the Markana massacre against the background of hazardous work conditions in the mines two decades after ì liberationî. Going well beyond the Farlam Commission of Inquiry it also examines, for the first time, the nightmare world of labour broking-cum-human trafficking. It evaluates the prospects for improving life in the near-mine communities that magnetise the poor and jobless in a society ranked among the most unequal, in the world. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in a country of iconic proportions whose political and economic leadership is fast losing capacity to service basic human needs and disappointed popular aspirations. This includes readers in the mining sector, in ethical investment circles across the globe, labour activists, academics, opinion-makers, government and anyone else with an interest in human rights and social justice.
