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This article explores the ethical difficulties that arise because of the interaction between fieldwork practitioners and their sites, in terms of the positionality of the researcher. What are the ethics of blending in or of standing out? This question stems from my experience of 12 months of fieldwork in South Africa in two distinct locales and among two different populations, one in which I could “pass” and another in which I was marked as various degrees of “outsider.” Drawing on this fieldwork, as well as an overview of the literature in political science on positionality, I argue that our discipline—because of the way it shapes interactions and research outcomes—must take positionality seriously in ethical training and practice.

Twenty years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, organizations representing key voting constituencies-youth and the economically marginalized-are becoming major forces of opposition to the ANC-led government while explicitly framing their activities as non-political. They prefer instead to talk in terms of \"rights\" and \"activism.\" Drawing from fieldwork and online publications of three opposition organizations-#RhodesMustFall, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and Afriforum-this article argues that the abandonment of \"politics\" is more than rhetorical positioning. By framing their actions as non-political, these groups engage in a deep-seated critique of the possibilities presented by democratic politics and a lack of perceived efficacy or legitimacy of institutionalized contestation. Perhaps more importantly, it means that opposition politics are occurring in an environment without institutional incentives for cooperation.

Descriptive research—work aimed at answering “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “how” questions—is vital at every stage of social scientific inquiry. The creative and analytic process of description—through concepts, measures, or cases, whether in numeric or narrative form—is crucial for conducting research aimed at understanding politics in action. Yet, our field tends to devalue such work as “merely descriptive” (Gerring 2012), subsidiary to or less valuable than hypothesis-drive causal inference. This article posits four key areas in which description contributes to political science: in conceptualization, in policy relevance, in the management and leveraging of data, and in challenging entrenched biases and diversifying our field.

Students engaged in the spring 2015 protests on the University of Cape Town campus demanded the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, prompting renewed debate over the appropriate treatment of colonial and apartheid-era statuary in contemporary South African public spaces. While the students' protests were often dismissed in public discourse and media coverage as misguided or misinformed, this article situates them in the broader context of symbolic reparations central to the transition to multiracial democracy. We introduce the terms 'monologic commemoration' and 'multiplicative commemoration' to describe the two dominant phases of South African public memory initiatives during and after apartheid. Monologic commemoration promotes a singular historical narrative of national identity and heroic leadership, whereas multiplicative commemoration requires the representation of as many diverse experiences and viewpoints as possible. We examine the #RhodesMustFall campaign as an eruption of discontent with both the monologic and multiplicative approaches, potentially signalling a new 'post-transitional' phase of South African public culture.

Social capital research has measured the concept in two distinct ways: through direct reporting by participants in cross-national surveys and the presence of associative organisations. Both strategies raise difficulties: the former restricts comparability and assumes group stability; the latter relies on literal translation and uses direct questioning. We problematise these approaches and argue that the ratio of ‘check-points’ where individuals are asked to demonstrate adherence to rules, and ‘trust-points’ where such proofs are not required, can better measure social capital. Moreover, the unevenness of social capital between groups is perceptible by ‘fast-lanes’ that differentially treat individuals based on identity. Evidence from a field survey and observational evidence in South Africa is presented.

This article attempts to understand how print cultures servicing different language communities fuel nationalisms that are not coterminous with a nation state. In the tradition of scholars like Benedict Anderson, it examines the connections between nationalism and print culture, but with reference to a single important event: violence at the Marikana mine. These events constituted the largest act of lethal force against civilians in the post-apartheid era. The South African press in three languages - Afrikaans, isiZulu, and English - covered the violence that erupted at the Lonmin mine in Marikana in mid-August 2012. Using original translations of daily newspapers and quantitative content analysis, the article assesses the differences among the various print media outlets covering the event. It finds that news coverage varied significantly according to the language medium in three ways: attribution of action, portrayal of sympathy and blame, and inclusion of political and economic coverage in the aftermath of the violence. These variations in coverage coincided with differences between reading publics divided by race, class, and location. The article argues that the English-language bias of most media analysis misses key points of contestation that occur in different media, both within South Africa, and throughout the post-colonial world.

Which factor – being an electoral loser or being a non-voter – has a greater negative influence on perceptions of democratic institutions in South Africa? Employing four waves of Afrobarometer data, this analysis finds that both negatively correlate with evaluations of democracy and parliament in particular, with weaker results after controlling for demographic and geographic factors. However, little consistency emerges as to which has the greater negative influence on perceptions. Furthermore, disaggregating non-voters finds that those preferring parties that lost have the lowest evaluations overall.

My research examines how and why national communities can emerge from post-conflict situations, specifically in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. My dissertation focuses on a central question: how and why do former aggressors in negotiated transitions come to feel that they belong to a single, national unit? I argue that in the post-apartheid era, narratives of racialized belonging and opposition reinforce the contentious identities of the anti-apartheid struggle. These identities are reinforced through the politics of space, language, political parties, historical interpretation and performance. Consequently, such identities threaten the project of building a South African nation and the creation of sustainable and democratic forms of opposition. My explanation is developed from interviews and ethnographic data collected during a year of fieldwork in South Africa, with the support of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Institute for International Education.

African political systems have a long history that substantially predates the arrival of Europeans in the 1400s or the political boundaries of nation-states found on any current map. The peoples of Africa have organized many different types of political systems and witnessed tremendous political changes over time. And yet one of the most enduring puzzles has been whether African political systems will grow into stable democracies. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the majority of African countries achieved in dependence from colonial rule, many analysts were hopeful about the propects for expanding citizenship in newly independent regimes. Debates