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In this timely and essential book, Stephen Chan explores the political landscape of southern Africa, examining how it's poised to change over the next years and what the repercussions are likely to be across the continent. He focuses on three countries in particular: South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, all of which have remained interconnected since the end of colonial rule and the overthrow of apartheid. One of the key themes in the book is the relationship between South Africa and Zimbabwe, and Chan sheds new light on the shared intellectual capacities and interests of the two countries' respective presidents, Jacob Zuma and Robert Mugabe. Along the way, the personalities and abilities of key players, such as Morgan Tsvangirai, the prime minister of Zimbabwe, and former South African president Thabo Mbeki, emerge in honest and sometimes surprising detail. InSouthern Africa, Chan draws on three decades of experience to provide the definitive inside guide to this complex region and offer insight on how the near future is likely to be a litmus test not just for this trio of countries but for all of Africa.

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.

At the heart of South Africa's 'miracle' transition from intractable ethno-racial conflict to democracy was an improvised nation born out of war weariness, hope, idealism and calculated pragmatism on the part of the elites who negotiated the compromise settlement. In the absence of any of the conventional bonds of national consciousness, the improvised nation was fixed on the civic identity and national citizenship envisaged in the new constitution. In the twentieth anniversary year of the country's democracy, South Africa reviews the progress of nation-building in post-apartheid South Africa, assesses how well the improvised nation has been embedded in a shared life for South Africans and offers a prognosis for its future. It draws up a socio-economic profile of the population which is the raw material of nation-building. It measures the contributions of the polity and the constitution, religion and values, as well as sport and the media, to building a sense of national citizenship. The book explains the abrupt discontinuity between the contributions of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki to nation-building and goes on to note the changing focus from reconciliation between black and white to include a concern for social cohesion in a society beset by violent crime, corruption and citizen deviance and dissidence. South Africa reconsiders the short, intense life cycle of Afrikaner nationalism and portrays the ambiguous relationships between African nationalism, non-racialism, civic nationalism and 'African tradition' in the ideology and practice of the African National Congress. In doing so, it provides a comprehensive analysis of a crucial aspect of South Africa's first twenty years of democracy, as well as exploring intriguing questions for the student of nationalism.

An African Athens offers an analysis of a new ecology of rhetoric--the reshaping of a nation into a democracy through rhetorical means. Author Philippe-Joseph Salazar provides a general view of issues as they have taken shape in the apartheid and post-apartheid South African experience, presenting the country as a remarkable stage for playing out the great themes of public deliberation and the rise of postmodern rhetorical democracy. Salazar's intimate vantage point focuses on the striking case of a democracy won at the negotiating table and also won every day in public deliberation. This volume presents a full-scale rhetorical analysis of a democratic transformation in post-Cold War era, and provides a study of the demise of apartheid and post-apartheid from the standpoint of political and public rhetoric and communication. In doing so, it serves as a template for similar enquiries in the rhetorical study of emerging democracies. Intended for readers engaged in the study of political and public rhetoric with an interest in how democracy takes shape, An African Athens highlights South Africa as a test case for global democracy, for rhetoric, and for the relevance of rhetoric studies in a postmodern democracy. Contents: C. Bazerman, Series Editor's Foreword. Preface. Desmond Tutu: The Oratorical Link. \"So to Speak\": The Rhetoric of Mandela. The Two Rhetorics of the Presidency. Democratic Deliberations. Reconciliation and Rhetoric. The \"True Colours\" of Popular Deliberation. The Rhetorical Cosmetics of Peace. Space as Democratic Deliberation. Conclusion: Robben Island as Foundation Rhetoric. Appendices.

The book examines the reform of the communication sector in South Africa as a detailed and extended case study in political transformation - the transition from apartheid to democracy. The reform of broadcasting, telecommunications, the state information agency and the print press from apartheid-aligned apparatuses to accountable democratic institutions took place via a complex political process in which civil society activism, embodying a post-social democratic ideal, largely won out over the powerful forces of formal market capitalism and older models of state control. In the cautious acceptance of the market, the civil society organizations sought to use the dynamism of the market while thwarting its inevitable inequities. Forged in the crucible of a difficult transition to democracy, communication reform in South Africa was navigated between the National Party's embrace of the market and the African National Congress leadership's default statist orientation.

Mobilizing for Peace brings together the work of international experts to provide an in-depth study of thirty-three peace/conflict organizations in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine. The contributors show how the sociopolitical and cultural context of the conflict in eachregion has shaped the type of resolution organizations that have emerged and their conception of the conflict and its resolution. By promoting more humane images of the contestants and by offering alternative peaceful approaches to resolve the conflict, the organizations have successfully galvanizedpreviously weak or non-existent pro-peace political forces to become important players in the political struggle for peace.

Peace and conflict‐resolution organizations (P/CROs) are civil society organizations dedicated to resolving protracted conflicts. Teams of local researchers coordinated by an international advisory board, investigate the characteristics, roles, similarities, and differences of P/CROs in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel/Palestine in the last third of the twentieth century. Comparative research of this sort throws up definitional, conceptual, and methodological difficulties. A historical overview of the three conflicts reveals shared features: disputes over land; forced settlements; ethnonational divisions; and the intersection of class and race. In South Africa, P/CROs engaged in antimilitarization activities, mediation, promoting contact between white and black communities, encouraging dialog between elites, and research, and with other antiapartheid nongovernmental organizations and the mass‐based resistance movements formed a “multiorganizational field.” In Israel, P/CRO activities included consciousness raising and protest, dialog promotion, some professional service provision, and the articulation of propeace arguments, but received little credit for any contributions they made to the peace process. Palestinian P/CROs were few and weakly developed as a result of Palestine's sociopolitical culture, although they performed human rights advocacy, international diplomacy, and domestic consciousness raising. Northern Ireland's voluntary sector was large, and included many P/CROs, which tended to focus on the symptoms of the conflict rather than the cause, and had little impact on the peace process beyond bringing an “inclusivist” philosophy to the political arena, fostering political debate, and providing some progressive leadership. Across the three regions, some P/CRO similarities emerged: foreign funding was crucial; charismatic leadership was important; almost all P/CROs became more professional and formal over time; and most P/CROs employed the same sorts of tactics, with some variation according to political context, but framed their conflicts differently. In general, it seems P/CRO impact was minimal: they played no direct role in the resolution of their respective conflicts but made indirect contributions.

Davenport describes the changes that took place leading to the end of apartheid, the process of reconciliation among the various elements of South African society, and discusses the country?s peace-making and constitution-building efforts.