Who We Are
Focus 55 Chapters
Editorial
‘Justice’ is a protean concept. ‘Law and order’ are maintained by governments and ruling elites in its name.
Universalising the Enlightenment
Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winning economist, has recently – to wide and highly influential critical acclaim – published The Idea of Justice, a major, brilliant, book of great erudition and scope.
Procedural Justice
This article focuses primarily on procedural justice with particular reference to the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa of 1996 and the justice system in South Africa.
Social Welfare: Social Stasis
South Africa’s democratic transition in 1994 was not only a transformative change to political institutions and political process.
Education and Injustice
Education has the potential to play a key role in addressing societal injustice by equalising opportunities, facilitating development, and strengthening democracy.
The State and Transformation
It is now familiar that under Thabo Mbeki the democratic project experienced several major reversals.
Pervasive Impunity
Nation-wide reaction to the court proceedings against the ‘Reitz four’ students, and the University of the Free State’s dropping of internal charges against them for their degrading treatment of the University’s female employees has recently highlighted the possible connection between the template of forgiveness central to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and attitudes and events shaping contemporary South African society.
‘History to the defeated May say Alas, but cannot help or pardon’
Revolutionary wars became a feature of modern history after the American Revolution of 1776. It is no accident that the word “guerrilla” – whose original meaning was mini-war – derives from precisely such an experience in the mountains of Spain during the Napoleonic Wars.
People’s War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa
The Greek poet Archilochus offers an illuminating prism though which to view Anthea Jeffery’s voluminous and illuminating book on the struggle for South Africa that led eventually to the triumph of the African National Congress and its installation as the governing party in 1994, even though Archilochus lived in the seventh century BC.
People’s War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa
Anthea Jeffery’s central thesis in her book, People’s War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa, that the ANC deliberately killed thousands of South Africans in a scorched earth strategy to capture power at all costs from the Nationalist government in the dying days of apartheid, is simply not true.
Right of Reply
Pallo Jordan goes round in circles in his caricature of my book, seeking to reduce it to a simplistic conspiracy theory which no one can seriously entertain.
The Poverty of Ideas: South African Democracy and the Retreat of Intellectuals
The Poverty of Ideas is a gigantic failure. It claims to be about intellectuals’ retreat within the South African democracy. It is not. Instead, it hosts a number of pieces that do not, as a collection, adequately speak to the book’s overall inspiration.
The Poverty of Ideas: South African Democracy and the Retreat of Intellectuals
The editors of this volume, William Gumede, author of Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC (2005) and Leslie Dikeni, a Research Associate at the Department of International Politics at the University of Pretoria, decry what they call the retreat of intellectuals since the advent of democracy in 1994.
