"What are democracies meant to do? And how does one know when one is a democratic state?" These incisive questions and more by leading political scientist, Steven Friedman, underlie this robust enquiry into what democracy means for South Africa post 1994.

Democracy and its prospects are often viewed through a lens which reflects the dominant Western understanding. New democracies are compared to idealised notions of the way in which the system is said to operate in the global North. The democracies of Western Europe and North America are understood to be the finished product and all others are assessed by how far they have progressed towards approximating this model. The goal of new democracies, like South Africa and other developing nation-states, is thus to become like the global North.

Power in Action persuasively argues against this stereotype. Friedman asserts that democracies can only work when every adult has an equal say in the public decisions that affect them. From this point of view, democracies are not finished products and some nations in the global South may be more democratic than their Northern counterparts. Democracy is achieved not by adopting idealised models derived from other societies – rather, it is the product of collective action by citizens who claim the right to be heard not only through public protest action, but also through the conscious exercise of influence on public and private power holders.

Viewing democracy in this way challenges us to develop a deeper understanding of democracy’s challenges and in so doing to ensure that more citizens can claim a say over more decisions in society.

In 2016, the country watched as eight journalists stood up to the public broadcaster to dissent against the censorship imposed by COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng and the capture of the newsroom. They would become known as the SABC8. While many may remember the headlines, photos and footage that circulated during that time, few know the real story: the way lives were changed while history was being made.

Now, Foeta Krige, one of the SABC8, shares his version of events: how it came about that eight very different journalists from within the public broadcaster, each with their own unique background and motivation, were brought together by circumstance to fight the mighty SABC in the name of media freedom. This forms the backdrop for a lesser-known story – one of death threats, intimidation, assault and the eventual death of Suna Venter. Her death shocked the nation and baffled investigators. Was it a natural death caused by stress, or were there more sinister forces involved? To understand why her death was red-flagged, it is necessary to retrace her steps and how they converged with those of the seven other journalists.

Krige takes the reader back to the day when everything started, telling the gripping, and often harrowing, story behind the sensational headlines.

This book reads like a war-time thriller.

We hear for the first time from internationalists who secretly worked for the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), in the struggle to liberate South Africa from apartheid rule. They acted as couriers, provided safe houses in the neighbouring states and within South Africa, helped infiltrate combatants across borders, and smuggled tonnes of weapons into the country in the most creative of ways. Driven by a spirit of international solidarity, they were prepared to take huge risks and face danger which dogged them at every turn. At least three were captured and served long terms of imprisonment, while others were arrested and, following international pressure, deported. They reveal what motivated them as volunteers, not mercenaries, who gained nothing for their endeavours save for the self-esteem in serving a just cause.

Against such clandestine involvement, the book includes contributions from key role players in the international Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) and its public mobilisation to isolate the apartheid regime. These include worldwide campaigns like Stop the Sports Tours, boycotting South African products, and black American solidarity.

The Cuban, East German and Russian contributions outline those countries’ support for the ANC and MK. The public, global AAM campaigns provide the dimension from which internationalists who secretly served MK emerged.

This is an invaluable historic resource, explaining in highly readable style the significance of international solidarity for today’s youth in challenging times.

Melinda Ferguson is the bestselling author of her addiction trilogy: Smacked, Hooked and Crashed. She is also an award-winning publisher.

To escape the pandemic, Ferguson finds her dream house on a private nature reserve, secluded in the otherworldly Cedarberg. A week before it's registered, a beautiful high-powered exec is brutally murdered next door. How could heaven have transformed into hell in an instant?

Written in her no-holds-barred signature style, Bamboozled is set in an age of fear, on a dystopian planet floundering in a maze of deception. In her search for sanity, Ferguson tries to untangle herself from a masked world gone mad, in which the media are controlled by the Invisible, Big Tech are mining our lives, where truth-tellers are mercilessly hunted and where, in certain countries, there are now Ministries of Loneliness.

Driven by an ancient human yearning to connect, the author must go on a deep journey into the unknown if she is to find her garden of songbirds and her torch of freedom and joy. The book is also about losing money and finding magic, while trying to work out who killed the woman next door.

This stirring collection of essays and talks by activist and former judge Albie Sachs is the culmination of more than 25 years of thought about constitution-making and non-racialism. Following the Constitutional Court's landmark Nkandla ruling in March 2016, it serves as a powerful reminder of the tenets of the Constitution, the rule of law and the continuous struggle to uphold democratic rights and freedoms. We, The People offers an intimate insider's view of South Africa's Constitution by a writer who has been deeply entrenched in its historical journey from the depths of apartheid right up to the politically contested present.

As a second-year law student at the University of Cape Town, Sachs took part in the Defiance Campaign and went on to attend the Congress of the People in Kliptown, where the Freedom Charter was adopted in 1955. Three decades later, shortly after the bomb attack in Maputo that cost him his arm and the sight in one eye, he was called on by the Constitutional Committee of the African National Congress to co-draft (with Kader Asmal) the first outline of a Bill of Rights for a new democratic South Africa. In 1994, he was appointed by Nelson Mandela to the Constitutional Court, where he served as a judge until 2009. We, The People contains some of Sachs' most memorable public talks and writings, in which he takes us back to the broad-based popular foundations of the Constitution in the Freedom Charter. He picks up on Oliver Tambo's original vision of a non-racial future for South Africa, rather than one based on institutionalised power-sharing between the races. He explores the tension between perfectability and corruptibility, hope and mistrust, which lies at the centre of all constitutions.

Sachs discusses the enforcement of social and economic rights, and contemplates the building of the Constitutional Court in the heart of the Old Fort Prison as a mechanism for reconciling the past and the future. Subjective experience and objective analysis interact powerfully in a personalised narrative that reasserts the value of constitutionality not just for South Africans, but for people striving to advance human dignity, equality and freedom across the world today.

The Misery Merchants is a hard-hitting exposé of G4S, the company running one of South Africa’s private prisons in Mangaung. Hopkins presents up-close encounters with the gangs who run the prisons, and a unique insight into the minds of the men on the torture squad, who doused inmates with water before electrocuting them, and in some cases, strapped down ‘unruly’ prisoners and forced anti-psychotic medicines into their systems.

In the Free State of Ace Magashule, both the gangs and the prison bosses competed to run Mangaung Prison, one of South Africa’s few private prisons. Torture and forced medication were the order of the day. Hopkins, a seasoned journalist, has interviewed over 100 prisoners and many prison warders in order to understand what makes this prison so dysfunctional. Her insights and revelations will astonish you.

This book follows several characters who were held in or worked at the prison. L. is a prison gang general and an advocate for prisoners’ rights. He smuggled information on assaults, injections and corruption out of the prison for the author. Dan is a prison guard and a shop steward for the union. He led the workforce during two strikes and paid for it with his job and union membership. Setlai is a Department of Correctional Services official who blew the whistle on the abuse at Mangaung Prison in 2009. His reports were ignored and he was punished for speaking out. He was criminally charged and moved to another DCS post. Shakes is a member of the Emergency Security Team (EST) also known as the Ninjas. He engaged in torture and abuse but now feels ‘what we did was wrong’.

G4S is the largest security company in the world, and has its claws deep in SA’s government and private companies. Drive down any street and you’ll find a G4S van collecting or delivering money.

Healthcare delivery in the 21st century has become increasingly complex and demanding . Clinical consultations frequently raise scientific, ethical and legal challenges. While scientific issues may be resolved using an evidence-based medicine (EBM) approach, ethical theory is needed to justify decision making in the face of ethical conflict. Medical ethics, law and human rights: a South African perspective provides the conceptual background and analytic skills necessary to assist with the resolution of ethical dilemmas encountered in the South African healthcare environment. Medical ethics, law and human rights: a South African perspective uses case studies to help the healthcare team to identify and analyse ethical, moral and value concepts, and to apply these to scenarios that they may encounter on a daily basis. Part 1 explores theories and principles of ethics (including African philosophy), introduces medical law, discusses health and human rights, and also makes the transition from theory to practice. Part 2 looks at specific topics in healthcare that raise challenges from an ethics perspective - HIV/AIDS, use of social media, euthanasia, human reproduction, genetics and genomics. In view of the increasing emphasis on ethical considerations in healthcare from the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA), coupled with the rising incidence of litigation in healthcare, Medical ethics, law and human rights: a South African perspective is essential reading for health science, law and philosophy students as well as practising healthcare professionals.

George Bizos is one of a distinguished group of human rights lawyers who in the dark days of apartheid sought to uncover the state's role in eliminating its opponents.

Some, like Biko, Timol and Aggett, were arrested and died in detention, while others, like Matthew Goniwe, were abducted and killed. As counsel for the families of the deceased, George Bizos was centrally involved in many of the inquests following these high-profile deaths.

He is thus well placed to tell the story of the great courtroom dramas in which, with devastating skill, he and his colleagues pared away the tissue of lies protecting the security forces and the state functionaries—only to be rewarded with the invariable finding that there was 'no one to blame'.

The killing of thirty-four miners by police at Marikana in August 2012 was the largest massacre of civilians in South Africa since Sharpeville. The events have been covered in newspaper articles, on TV news and in a commission of inquiry, but there is still confusion about what happened on that fateful day.

In Murder At Small Koppie, renowned photojournalist Greg Marinovich explores the truth behind the Marikana massacre. He investigates the shootings near Wonderkop hill, which happened in view of the media, as well as the killings that happened beyond the view of cameras at a nondescript collection of boulders known as Small Koppie, some 300 metres away. Many of the men killed here were shot in cold blood at close range. Drawing on his own meticulous research, eyewitness accounts and the findings of the Marikana Commission of Inquiry, Marinovich accurately reconstructs that fateful day as well as the events leading up to the strike, and looks at the subsequent denials, obfuscation and buck-passing by Lonmin, the SAPS and the government.

This is the definitive account of the Marikana massacre from the journalist whose award-winning investigation into the tragedy has been called the most important piece of South African journalism since apartheid.

Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country.

Since his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela has been at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality.

Long Walk To Freedom is his moving autobiography, in which he tells the extraordinary story of his life - an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph!

The Struggle Continues is a “searing, heartfelt, brutally honest account of the turbulent modern history of Zimbabwe” (Douglas Rogers author of The Last Resort).

This autobiographical political history since the 1950s deals with an era of great turbulence from the perspective a person who has been at the centre of the great Zimbabwean drama for over 30 years, David Coltart.

It is set to be the most authoritative book to date of the last sixty years of Zimbabwe’s history, described by the doyenne of Southern African journalists, Peta Thornycroft, as “a masterpiece”: from the obstinate racism of Ian Smith that provoked Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1965, to the civil war of the 1970s, the Gukurahundi genocide of the 1980s, the land invasions of the 2000s, Robert Mugabe’s Murambatsvina war on poor urban dwellers in 2005, and the struggles waged by the MDC in confronting a brutal regime.

Contesting one’s place remains central to confronting the lingering impact of colonisation and apartheid, emerging as it does out of the intermingling of our environments, histories, languages and experiences. In this volume, architects, anthropologists, artists, urban planners, activists and historians examine the ways in which people are rethinking, repurposing and reusing colonial and apartheid architecture and infrastructure. They seek to engage with ways in which history, art and architecture practices contest and subvert these protracted conditions in terms of social justice, development, conservation, heritage, land reclamation and urban renewal.

The focus is on colonial environments in different parts of South Africa and Africa to understand the history of disputed places and responses of remembrance, communal consideration, revival and conflict. In recent years, public awareness of the physical and environmental reminders of this past has been sharpened by sporadic campaigns and ongoing disputes around land, gentrification, repatriation and heritage. Globally, there has been a wave of public outcry and contestation about the place of racist names and statues in public spaces, litigation over abandoned and toxic sites, with calls for removal and restitution as an integral part of decolonisation. And there has been recognition of the lived experiences, knowledge and activities through which people and communities build their heritage.

In this context, questions about the place of colonial and apartheid planning and architecture and their past acquire salience and urgency in the present.

Land In South Africa examines how land and agrarian reform impacts nation building, citizenship, and identity formation. The publication draws attention to the limitations of reducing land to a commodity, and how this approach perpetuates social conflict and inequality in land reform policy implementation.

The book posits an alternative policy paradigm, which discusses contested meanings of land and their relation to nation formation. It brings to the fore citizen stakeholder perspectives from former labour tenants, citizens residing in communally owned land, women subsistence farmers, peasant movements and land reform civil society groups.

The chapters investigate the diverse and contested meanings of land to elevate how South Africans perceive land justice and reform, while also including several international case studies. The publication argues that land power relations and policy debates are constitutive components of nation building. And, importantly, that land shapes essential pillars in nation formation such as citizenship, political identity, heritage, a sense of belonging and social disparities.

The issue of land rights is an ongoing and complex topic of debate for South Africans. Rights to Land comes at a time when land redistribution by government is underway. This book seeks to understand the issues around land rights and distribution of land in South Africa and proposes that new policies and processes should be developed and adopted. It further provides an analysis of what went so wrong, and warns that a new phase of restitution may ignite conflicting ethnic claims and facilitate elite capture of land and rural resources.

While there are no quick fixes, the first phase of restitution should be completed and the policy then curtailed. The book argues that land ownership and administration is important to rural democracy and that this should not be placed under the control of traditionalist intermediaries. Land restitution, initiated in 1994, was an important response to the injustices of the apartheid era. But it was intended as a limited and short-term process – initially to be completed in five years.

It may continue for decades, creating uncertainty and undermining investment into agriculture.

An award-winning historian and journalist tells the very human story of apartheid's afterlife, tracing the fates of South African insurgents, collaborators, and the security police through the tale of the clandestine photo album used to target apartheid's enemies. From the 1960s until the early 1990s, the South African security police and counterinsurgency units collected over 7,000 photographs of apartheid's enemies.

The political rogue's gallery was known as the "terrorist album," copies of which were distributed covertly to police stations throughout the country. Many who appeared in the album were targeted for surveillance. Sometimes the security police tried to turn them; sometimes the goal was elimination. All of the albums were ordered destroyed when apartheid's violent collapse began. But three copies survived the memory purge.

With full access to one of these surviving albums, award-winning South African historian and journalist, Jacob Dlamini investigates the story behind these images: their origins, how they were used, and the lives they changed. Extensive interviews with former targets and their family members testify to the brutal and often careless work of the police. Although the police certainly hunted down resisters, the terrorist album also contains mug shots of bystanders and even regime supporters.

Their inclusion is a stark reminder that apartheid's guardians were not the efficient, if morally compromised, law enforcers of legend but rather blundering agents of racial panic. With particular attentiveness to the afterlife of apartheid, Dlamini uncovers the stories of former insurgents disenchanted with today?s South Africa, former collaborators seeking forgiveness, and former security police reinventing themselves as South Africa's newest export: "security consultants" serving as mercenaries for Western nations and multinational corporations.

The Terrorist Album is a brilliant evocation of apartheid's tragic caprice, ultimate failure, and grim legacy.

For more than five decades Walter and Albertina Sisulu were at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid. As secretary-general of the ANC, Walter was sentenced to life imprisonment with Nelson Mandela in 1964 and spent 26 years in prison until his release in 1989. While her husband and his colleagues were in jail, Albertina played a crucial role in keeping the ANC alive underground, and in the 1980s was co-President of the United Democratic Front. Their story has been one of persecution, bitter struggle and painful separation. But it is also one of patience, hope and enduring love.

In these vibrant narratives, 25 of the world’s most accomplished movement lawyers and activists become storytellers, reflecting on their experiences at the frontlines of some of the most significant struggles of our time. In an era where human rights are under threat, their words offer both an inspiration and a compass for the way movements can use the law – and must sometimes break it – to bring about social justice.

The contributors here take you into their worlds: Jennifer Robinson frantically orchestrating a protest outside London’s Ecuadorean embassy to prevent the authorities from arresting her client Julian Assange; Justin Hansford at the barricades during the protests over the murder of Black teenager Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Ghida Frangieh in Lebanon’s detention centres trying to access arrested protestors during the 2019 revolution; Pavel Chikov defending Pussy Riot and other abused prisoners in Russia; Ayisha Siddiqa, a shy Pakistani immigrant, discovering community in her new home while leading the 2019 youth climate strike in Manhattan; Greenpeace activist Kumi Naidoo on a rubber dinghy in stormy Arctic seas contemplating his mortality as he races to occupy an oil rig.

The stories in The Revolution Will Not Be Litigated capture the complex, and often-awkward dance between legal reform and social change. They are more than compelling portraits of fascinating lives and work, they are revelatory: of generational transitions; of epochal change and apocalyptic anxiety; of the ethical dilemmas that define our age; and of how one can make a positive impact when the odds are stacked against you in a harsh world of climate crisis and ruthless globalization.

The way that movements communicate with the general public matters for their chances of lasting success. Devo Woodly argue that the potential for movement-led political change is significantly rooted in mainstream democratic discourse and specifically in the political acceptance of new issues by news media, the general public, and elected officials. This is true to some extent for any group wishing to alter status quo distributions of rights and/or resources, but is especially important for grassroots challengers who do not already have a place of legitimated influence in the polity. By examining the talk of two contemporary movements, the living wage and marriage equality, during the critical decade after their emergence between 1994-2004, Woodly shows that while the living wage movement experienced over 120 policy victories and the marriage equality movement suffered many policy defeats, the overall impact that marriage equality had on changing American politics was much greater than that of the living wage because of its deliberate effort to change mainstream political discourse, and thus, the public understanding of the politics surrounding the issue.

Many transnational campaigns, and particularly the transnational campaign on violence against women, promote international norms that target the behavior of local non-state actors, while many of these local actors are subscribing to conflicting local norms. What happens when the international and local norms collide? When does transnational activism lead individuals and communities to abandon local norms and embrace international ones? In When Norms Collide, Karisa Cloward presents a theoretical framework for understanding the range of local-level responses to international norm promotion, and applies this framework to the issues of female genital mutilation (FGM) and early marriage. Cloward argues that, conditional on exposure to an international normative message, individuals can decide to change their attitudes, their actual behavior, and the public image they present to international and local audiences. She finds that the impact of transnational activism on individual decision-making substantially depends on the salience of the international and local norms to their respective proponents, as well as on community-level factors such as the density of NGO activity and the availability of an exit option from the local norm. She further finds that there are both social and temporal dimensions to the diffusion of international norms across individuals and through communities. Cloward evaluates the theory by examining changes in the patterns of FGM and early marriage among the Maasai and Samburu in Kenya, using a mixed-method empirical strategy that includes qualitative interviews and an original representative survey with a randomized experimental component.

The days of "revolutionary" campaign strategies are gone. The extraordinary has become ordinary, and campaigns at all levels, from the federal to the municipal, have realized the necessity of incorporating digital media technologies into their communications strategies. Still, little is understood about how these practices have been taken up and routinized on a wide scale, or the ways in which the use of these technologies is tied to new norms and understandings of political participation and citizenship in the digital age. The vocabulary that we do possess for speaking about what counts as citizenship in a digital age is limited. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a federal-level election, interviews with communications and digital media consultants, and textual analysis of campaign materials, this book traces the emergence and solidification of campaign strategies that reflect what it means to be a citizen in the digital era. It identifies shifting norms and emerging trends to build new theories of citizenship in contemporary democracy. Baldwin-Philippi argues that these campaign practices foster engaged and skeptical citizens. But, rather than assess the quality or level of participation and citizenship due to the use of technologies, this book delves into the way that digital strategies depict what "good" citizenship ought to be and the goals and values behind the tactics.

The Geneva Conventions are the best-known and longest-established laws governing warfare, but what difference do they make to how states engage in armed conflict? Since the start of the "War on Terror" with 9/11, these protocols have increasingly been incorporated into public discussion. We have entered an era where contemporary wars often involve terrorism and guerrilla tactics, but how have the rules that were designed for more conventional forms of interstate violence adjusted? Do the Geneva Conventions Matter? provides a rich, comparative analysis of the laws that govern warfare and a more specific investigation relating to state practice. Matthew Evangelista and Nina Tannenwald convey the extent and conditions that symbolic or "ritual" compliance translates into actual compliance on the battlefield by looking at important studies across history. To name a few, they navigate through the Algerian War for independence from France in the 1950s and 1960s; the US wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; Iranian and Israeli approaches to the laws of war; and the legal obligations of private security firms and peacekeeping forces. Thoroughly researched, this work adds to the law and society literature in sociology, the constructivist literature in international relations, and legal scholarship on "internalization." Do the Geneva Conventions Matter? gives insight into how the Geneva regime has constrained guerrilla warfare and terrorism and the factors that affect protect human rights in wartime.

Barack Obama flipped the script on more than three decades of conventional wisdom when he openly embraced hip hop-often regarded as politically radioactive-in his presidential campaigns. Just as important was the extent to which hip hop artists and activists embraced him in return. This new relationship fundamentally altered the dynamics between popular culture, race, youth, and national politics. But what does this relationship look like now, and what will it look like in the decades to come? The Hip Hop & Obama Reader attempts to answer these questions by offering the first systematic analysis of hip hop and politics in the Obama era and beyond. Over the course of 14 chapters, leading scholars and activists offer new perspectives on hip hop's role in political mobilization, grassroots organizing, campaign branding, and voter turnout, as well as the ever-changing linguistic, cultural, racial, and gendered dimensions of hip hop in the U.S. and abroad. Inviting readers to reassess how Obama's presidency continues to be shaped by the voice of hip hop and, conversely, how hip hop music and politics have been shaped by Obama, The Hip Hop & Obama Reader critically examines hip hop's potential to effect social change in the 21st century. This volume is essential reading for scholars and fans of hip hop, as well as those interested in the shifting relationship between democracy and popular culture. Foreword: Tricia Rose, Brown University Afterword: Cathy Cohen, University of Chicago

The fifth edition of this highly praised study charts and explains the progress that continues to be made towards the goal of worldwide abolition of the death penalty. The majority of nations have now abolished the death penalty and the number of executions has dropped in almost all countries where abolition has not yet taken place. Emphasising the impact of international human rights principles and evidence of abuse, the authors examine how this has fuelled challenges to the death penalty and they analyse and appraise the likely obstacles, political and cultural, to further abolition. They discuss the cruel realities of the death penalty and the failure of international standards always to ensure fair trials and to avoid arbitrariness, discrimination and conviction of the innocent: all violations of the right to life. They provide further evidence of the lack of a general deterrent effect; shed new light on the influence and limits of public opinion; and argue that substituting for the death penalty life imprisonment without parole raises many similar human rights concerns. This edition provides a strong intellectual and evidential basis for regarding capital punishment as undeniably cruel, inhuman and degrading. Widely relied upon and fully updated to reflect the current state of affairs worldwide, this is an invaluable resource for all those who study the death penalty and work towards its removal as an international goal.

Across the world, governments design and implement policies with the explicit goal of promoting social justice. But can such institutions change entrenched social norms? And what effects should we expect from differently designed policies? Francesca R. Jensenius' Social Justice through Inclusion is an empirically rich study of one of the most extensive electoral quota systems in the world: the reserved seats for the Scheduled Castes (SCs, the former "untouchables") in India's legislative assemblies. Combining evidence from quantitative datasets from the period 1969-2012, archival work, and in-depth interviews with politicians, civil servants, and voters across India, the book explores the long-term effects of electoral quotas for the political elite and the general population. It shows that the quota system has played an important role in reducing caste-based discrimination, particularly at the elite level. Interestingly, this is not because the system has led to more group representation - SC politicians working specifically for SC interests - but because it has made possible the creation and empowerment of a new SC elite who have gradually become integrated into mainstream politics. This is a study of India, but the findings and discussions have broader implications. Policies such as quotas are usually supported with arguments about various assumed positive long-term consequences. The nuanced discussions in this book shed light on how electoral quotas for SCs have shaped the incentives for politicians, parties, and voters, and indicate the trade-offs inherent in how such policies of group inclusion are designed.