This book of essays written over the last three post-apartheid decades uniquely provides profiles of 104 pan-African figures, mostly from the 1.4 billion-strong African population and its estimated 250 million-strong diaspora in the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean. It thus provides a concise profile of the most important figures of Africa and its diaspora.

The profiles also include global Western figures engaging with African issues, assessed from an African perspective. The essays cover, in a multi-disciplinary manner, diverse historical and political figures, technocrats, activists, writers, public intellectuals, musical and film artists, and sporting figures. They acknowledge the continuing legacies and impacts of the twin scourges of slavery and colonialism, but also seek to capture the zeitgeist of the post-apartheid era.

The book argues that the culmination of Africa’s liberation struggles was mirrored by similar battles in the Caribbean as well as the American civil rights movement, with all three involving citizens of global Africa.

What is your stake in the upcoming 2024 election in South Africa – the most crucial election since 1994? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the outcome? As a businessperson, consumer, worker or farmer, you will be affected by the election results and the significant changes that are likely to appear in South Africa’s political economy. The 2024 election gives South Africans the opportunity to decide what the country and its political leadership will look like in the future.

Tipping Point – Turmoil Or Reform? examines some critical questions about the country’s political and socioeconomic landscape today and whether the 2024 election outcome is likely to signal more gloom or will it rather pave the way for positive and enduring reforms. Edited by prominent economist Raymond Parsons, the book comprises pieces by some of South Africa’s leading intellectuals and thought leaders, all of whom have seriously considered South Africa’s post-election future.

Among the major themes emerging from the different chapters, which will help to steer the national agenda in the months and years ahead, are: South Africa’s political prospects after 2024; the future role of coalition politics in South Africa; the dynamics between business and the economy; what South Africa’s geopolitical leanings mean for the country’s trade competitiveness; how to make local government work; need for greater community engagement and why doing business in South Africa is challenging.

Tipping Point – Turmoil Or Reform? is as absorbing as it is frank, informing readers (and, importantly, voters) about the harsh reality of where South Africa is today but also offering them hope of a much better tomorrow – which will largely depend on the critical choices they make during this watershed election year for South Africa.

A “gripping and important” (The Guardian) account of nine tumultuous days, as the assassination of Nelson Mandela’s protégé by a white supremacist threatens to derail South Africa’s democratic transition and plunge the nation into civil war.

Johannesburg, Easter weekend, 1993. Nelson Mandela had been released after twenty-seven years in prison and was in power sharing talks with President F.W. de Klerk. After decades of resistance, the apartheid regime seemed poised to fall…until a white supremacist shot and killed Mandela’s popular heir apparent, Chris Hani, in a last desperate attempt to provoke civil war.

Twenty-two-year-old rookie journalist Justice Malala was one of the first people at the crime scene. And as he covered the growing chaos of the next nine days—the protests and police brutality, reprisal killings and calls for paramilitary units to get combat-ready—he was terrified the assassin’s plot might succeed.

Islam's relationship to liberal-democratic politics has emerged as one of the most pressing and contentious issues in international affairs. This book analyzes the relationship between religion, secularism, and liberal democracy, both theoretically and in the context of the contemporary Muslim world. This book challenges a widely held belief among social scientists that religious politics and liberal-democratic development are structurally incompatible. While there are certainly tensions between Islam and democracy -- Hashemi draws on Iran as an example -- the two are not irreconcilable. He affirms the need for political secularism in order for liberal democracy to flourish, and examines how Muslim societies can develop the political secularism required for liberal democracy when the main political, cultural and intellectual resources that are available are religious. Hashemi argues that democratization and liberalization do not necessarily require a rejection or privatization of religion but do require a reinterpretation of religious ideas about the moral basis of legitimate political authority and individual rights. In fact, he shows, liberal democracy in the West often developed not in strict opposition to religious politics but in concert with it. Hashemi argues that an indigenous theory of Muslim secularism -- similar to what developed in the Christian West -- is possible and a necessary requirement for the advancement of liberal democracy in Muslim societies.

The Case for a Second Republic: South Africa’s Second Chance is a timely intervention that navigates South Africa’s transition as a republic over the past 30 years on the one hand, and the conundrum of the government of national unity on the other.

This book is not just politically thought-provoking, but erudite, educational and informative. It performs an urgent analytical sweep of 30 years of South Africa’s democracy, charting the long historical path that laid the foundations for the country’s geographical space from which its sovereignty derives. As an historian, Maloka takes the reader through an illuminating tour de force, spanning early South African history, the formation of the 1910 Union of South Africa and the democratic era.

In this book, Maloka differentiates the idea of a ‘Second Republic‘ from the so-called ‘Second Transition’ advanced by some ANC and Alliance partners around 2012. He also posits the idea of the ‘re-foundation of the state’. Maloka rejects the ongoing hysteria about South Africa becoming a ‘failed state’. Maloka calls for the crafting of a new governance paradigm based on three pillars: a self-reliant mind-set; a technocratic state (not political braskap); and substantive people’s power through street committees and direct election of public representatives.

Maloka strongly advocates for discussions around the possibility of the Second Republic, so as to find better mechanisms to address these issues that are a stubborn legacy of a long history of the country.

Pariah Politics breaks new ground in examining the issue of western Islamist extremism from the perspective of government. It links underlying causes to the capacity of governments to respond directly and to influence others. The book contains four main messages.
Focusing on causes, not symptoms. The book identifies four big causal drivers: settled disadvantage, social isolation, grievance and oppositional cultures, and the volatile dynamics of global Islam. Governments can hope to influence the first two, using existing and innovative policy levers. The scope to make big changes in the latter two is severely limited.
The circle of tacit support. Action by government to counter terrorism has relied too heavily on security policy measures to intercept or disrupt men of violence. This emphasis is misplaced. Though important, this fails to address the moral oxygen for violence and confrontation that exists within Muslim communities.
Better focus and better levers. Ministers and officials need to think and act smart. They need to push ahead with social inclusion policies to broaden opportunity. They need to make more use of community-based strategies to isolate extremism. They need to promote civil society actions so that affected communities can take control of their own reputational future. And, they desperately need to avoid making things worse.
Reputations matter. The pariah status of western Muslims has worsened by the fallout from terrorism. Few have anything good to say about western Muslims; still fewer can imagine an optimistic future. Yet earlier demonised groups, such as Jews or Asian refugees, have overcome significant hurdles, moving from pariahs to paragons. A credible willingness to tackle extremism is the most important first step to a reputational turnaround.

The Super-Afrikaners, originally published in 1978, scandalised a nation as it exposed the secret workings of the Broederbond. Out of print for over three decades, this edition with an introduction by Max du Preez is available for a new generation.

Formed in Johannesburg in 1918 by a group of young Afrikaners disillusioned by their role as dispossessed people in their own country, the first triumph of this remarkable organisation was the fact that it was largely responsible for welding together dissident factions within Afrikanerdom and thereby ensuring the accession of the National Party to power in 1948. This highly organised clique of Super-Afrikaners, by sophisticated political intrigue, waged a remarkable campaign to harness political, social and economic forces in South Africa to its cause … and succeeded.

Political journalists Hans Strydom and Ivor Wilkins traced, at great personal risk, its development from the earliest days to the present. The book includes the most comprehensive list of Broeders ever published.

Over the past hundred years, population policy has been a powerful tactic for achieving national goals. Whether the focus has been on increasing the birth rate to project strength and promote nation-building-as in Brazil in the 1960s, where the military government insisted that a "powerful nation meant a populous nation, " - or on limiting population through contraception and sterilization as a means of combatting overpopulation, poverty, and various other social ills, states have always used women's bodies as a political resource. In Reproductive States, a group of international scholars-specialists in population and reproductive politics of Japan, Germany, India, Egypt, Nigeria, China, Brazil, the Soviet Union/Russia, and the United States-explore the population politics, policies and practices adopted in these countries and offer reflections on the outcomes of those policies and their legacies. The essays in this volume focus on the context that stimulated nations to develop demographic imperatives regarding population size and "quality," and consider how those imperatives became unique sets of priorities and strategies. They also illuminate how these nations crafted their own policies and practices, often while responding to United Nations- and U.S.- driven population goals, tactics, and interventions. The global perspective of this volume shines light on national specificities, including change over time within a nation, while also capturing interconnections among various national politics and discourses, including evolving constructions of the key and complex concept of "overpopulation." The first volume to survey population policies from key countries on five continents and to interweave gender politics, reproductive rights, statecraft, and world systems, Reproductive States will be an essential work for scholars of anthropology, women and gender studies, feminist theory, and biopolitics.

Douglas Murray, international bestselling author and renowned cultural commentator confronts what he views as the most pressing issue of our time: why Western support of the Palestinian cause is ultimately playing into the hands of a much more dangerous force.

Drawing from intensive on-the-ground reporting in Israel, Gaza and Lebanon, Murray presents a compelling case that places the latest violence in its historical context. He takes readers on a harrowing journey through the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 massacre, piecing together exclusive accounts from victims, survivors and even the terrorists responsible for the atrocities.

On Democracies and Death Cults argues that Israel’s commitment to fundamental Western values – capitalism, individual rights, democracy and reason – has made it a beacon of progress in a region dominated by authoritarianism and extremism. Murray contrasts Israel’s principles with the ideology of Hamas, which openly proclaims its love of death over life. If left unchecked, Murray argues, this misplaced Western sympathy could embolden forces that seek to undermine democratic values and perpetuate a culture of violence.

Clear-eyed and deeply reasoned, On Democracies and Death Cults is a gripping and essential read for all who seek to understand the complexities of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and its implications for the future of democracy – and for the world itself.

Despite its manifest failures, the narrative of neoliberalism retains its grip on the public mind and the policies of governments all over the world. By this narrative, less regulation and more ‘animal spirits’ capitalism produces not only greater prosperity, but more freedom for individuals in society - and is therefore morally better.

But, in The Road to Freedom Stiglitz asks, whose freedom are we – should we be – thinking about? What happens when one person’s freedom comes at the expense of another’s? Should the freedoms of corporations be allowed to impinge upon those of individuals in the ways they now do? Taking on giants of neoliberalism such as Hayek and Friedman and examining how public opinion is formed, Stiglitz reclaims the language of freedom from the right to show that far from ‘free’ – unregulated – markets promoting growth and enterprise, they in fact reduce it, lessening economic opportunities for majorities and siphoning wealth from the many to the few – both individuals and countries. He shows how neoliberal economics and its implied moral system have impacted our legal and social freedoms in surprising ways, from property and intellectual rights, to education and social media.

Stiglitz’s eye, as always, is on how we might create the true human flourishing which should be the great aim of our economic and social system, and offers an alternative to that prevailing today. The Road to Freedom offers a powerful re-evaluation of democracy, economics and what constitutes a good society—and provides a roadmap of how we might achieve it.

Threatened with Internment for the duration of World War II, two young German geologists, Henno Martin and Hermann Korn, sought refuge in the Namib Desert and lived a Robinson Crusoe existence for two and a half years.

How they mastered their situation, what they did, thought and observed are the subject of The Sheltering Desert.

In it lies the vastness of the landscape, the clear skies, nature's silence in the joy or suffering of her creatures, and the stillness in which the reader, too, may take refuge from the wrongs of civilization.

In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful. In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.

An urgent, thrilling, and original look at the future of democracy that illuminates one of the most important battles of our time: the future of freedom and how to contain and defeat the autocrats mushrooming around the world.

In his bestselling book The End of Power, Moisés Naím examined power-diluting forces. In The Revenge of Power, Naím turns to the trends, conditions, technologies and behaviors that are contributing to the concentration of power, and to the clash between those forces that weaken power and those that strengthen it. He concentrates on the three “P”s―populism, polarization, and post-truths. All of which are as old as time, but are combined by today’s autocrats to undermine democratic life in new and frightening ways. Power has not changed. But the way people go about gaining it and using it has been transformed.

The Revenge of Power is packed with alluring characters, riveting stories about power grabs and losses, and vivid examples of the tricks and tactics used by autocrats to counter the forces that are weakening their power. It connects the dots between global events and political tactics that, when taken together, show a profound and often stealthy transformation in power and politics worldwide. Using the best available data and insights taken from recent research in the social sciences, Naím reveals how, on close examination, the same set of strategies to consolidate power pop up again and again in places with vastly different political, economic, and social circumstances, and offers insights about what can be done to ensure that freedom and democracy prevail.

The outcomes of these battles for power will determine if our future will be more autocratic or more democratic. Naím addresses the questions at the heart of the matter: Why is power concentrating in some places while in others it is fragmenting and degrading? And the big question: What is the future of freedom?

After the 2008 financial crisis, the cultural and psychological imprint that was left appears to be almost as deep as the one that followed the Great Depression. Its legacy includes new radical politics on both the left and the right, epidemics of opioid abuse, suicides, low birthrates, and widespread resentment that is racial, gendered, and otherwise by those who felt especially left behind. Most importantly it saw the rise and global spread of populism. Given that so many politicians of such different stripes can be populist, some argue the term is useless, but with so-called populists on the left and right experiencing a resurgence in the 21st century, the term is once again in the spotlight. There is a need for research on this increase in populist politics, the consequences for democracy, and what, if anything, should be done about this movement. Analyzing Current and Future Global Trends in Populism discusses the global rise of populism and anti-elitism through a look at the history of the term, an exploration of modern populism, and the important events and figures in the movement. This book will measure the levels of populism across citizens and political actors, explore populism's positive consequences, study the rise of populism in national politics, and discuss the future of populism in the 21st century as a major societal movement. This book is ideally intended for professionals and researchers working in the fields of politics, social science, business, and computer science and management, executives in different types of work communities and environments, practitioners, government officials, policymakers, academicians, students, and anyone else interested in populism, the greatest new political and societal movement of the 21st century.

Texas is a solid red state. Or trending purple. Or soon to be blue. One thing is certain: as Texas looms ever larger in national politics, the makeup of its electorate increasingly matters. At a critical moment, as migration, immigration, and a maturing populace alter the state's political landscape, this book presents a deeply researched, data-rich look at who Texas voters are, what they want, and what it might mean for the future of the Republican and Democratic parties, the state, and the nation. Battle for the Heart of Texas goes beyond the pronouncements of leaders and pundits to reveal voters' nuanced opinions-about the 2020 Democratic primary candidates, state and national Republicans' responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, and issues such as immigration and gun policy. Working with an unprecedented cache of polling figures and qualitative data from surveys and focus groups-the product of a cooperative effort between the Dallas Morning News and The University of Texas at Tyler-Mark Owens, Kenneth A. Wink, and Kenneth Bryant Jr. provide an in-depth examination of what is reshaping voter preferences across Texas, including the partisan impact of the urbanization and nationalization of state politics. Their analyses pinpoint the influence of race, media exposure, ideological diversity within the parties, and geographic variation across the state, detailing how Texas politics has changed over time. Race may not have typically defined Texas politics, for instance, but the authors find that rhetoric on policies related to race are now shaping the electorate. The diversity in civic engagement among the Latino community also emerges from the data, compounded and complicated by the growth of the Latino population of voting age. The largest red state in the country, with the second-largest population, Texas is crucial to the way we think about political change in America-and this book amply and precisely equips us to understand the bellwether state's changing politics.

A critical legal scholar uses feminist and environmental theory to sketch alternate futures for Appalachia. Environmental law has failed spectacularly to protect Appalachia from the ravages of liberal capitalism, and from extractive industries in particular. Remaking Appalachia chronicles such failures, but also puts forth hopeful paths for truly radical change. Remaking Appalachia begins with an account of how, over a century ago, laws governing environmental and related issues proved fruitless against the rising power of coal and other industries. Key legal regimes were, in fact, explicitly developed to support favored industrial growth. Aided by law, industry succeeded in maximizing profits not just through profound exploitation of Appalachia's environment but also through subordination along lines of class, gender, and race. After chronicling such failures and those of liberal development strategies in the region, Stump explores true system change beyond law "reform." Ecofeminism and ecosocialism undergird this discussion, which involves bottom-up approaches to transcending capitalism that are coordinated from local to global scales.