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Books > Social sciences
Dié nuwe, opgedateerde uitgawe van die topverkoper Nuwe geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika sluit bydraes in deur gerekende nuwe skrywers, wat die storie van ons land en mense reg tot op datum bring.
Onder redaksie van Bill Nasson word nuwe insigte uit die geskiedskrywing en die argeologie ingeweef. Die boek begin by die onstaan van die mensdom, vertel dan die storie van die Khoikhoi, slawe en burgers, die groot migrasies van die pre-koloniale tyd en later trekboere en Voortrekkers. Dan kom die ontdekking van diamante en goud wat die gang van die politiek radikaal verander. Oorlog breek uit in 1899; ook oorloë in 1914 en in 1939 in Europa laat plaaslik nuwe kragte vry. Die boek vertel van segregasie, politieke organisasie en verset, en uiteindelik die oorgang. Hierná val die soeklig op die demokratiese presidentskappe en die onverwagte en onvoorspelbare onlangse geskiedenis, wat staatskaping -- en beurtkrag -- insluit.
Met die nuutste inligting en invalshoeke word die volledige storie van Suid-Afrika en sy mense gesaghebbend dog leesbaar vertel.
Ten Maps that tell you everything your need to know about global
politics - the million copy international bestseller
Geography shapes not only our history, but where we're headed...
ON THE RUSSIA/UKRAINE CRISIS - What is driving Russia's foreign policy?
Why do Putin's actions mirror those made in the past? Prisoners of
Geography analyses the geographic weaknesses and historical invasions
of Russia's territories, exploring how they have ultimately shaped the
decisions of its leaders past and present.
All leaders are constrained by geography. Their choices are limited by
mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Yes, to follow world events you
need to understand people, ideas and movements - but if you don't know
geography, you'll never have the full picture.
If you've ever wondered why Putin is so obsessed with Crimea, why the
USA was destined to become a global superpower, or why China's power
base continues to expand ever outwards, the answers are all here.
In ten chapters and ten maps, Prisoners of Geography looks at the past,
present and future to offer an essential insight into one of the major
factors that determines world history.
Steven Pinker, one of the world's greatest thinkers and bestselling
author of Enlightenment Now, The Better Angels of Our Nature and The
Language Instinct, reveals the power and perils of thinking alike
As a cognitive scientist, the ultimate subject of Steven Pinker’s
fascination is how we think about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum.
It sounds impossible, but Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the
time. This awareness, which we experience as something that is public
or “out there,” is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous
impact on our social, political, and economic lives.
Common knowledge, Pinker shows, can make sense of many of life’s
enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of
nowhere, the posturing and pretence of diplomacy, the eruption of
social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness
of a first date. But people also go to great lengths to avoid common
knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t
know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like
benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and
pretending not to see the elephant in the room.
In exploring the paradoxes of human behaviour, When Everyone Knows that
Everyone Knows… invites us to understand the ways we try to get into
each other’s heads, and the harmonies, hypocrisies, and outrages that
result.
A wide-ranging rethinking of the many factors that comprise the
making of American Grand Strategy. What is grand strategy? What
does it aim to achieve? And what differentiates it from normal
strategic thought-what, in other words, makes it "grand"? In
answering these questions, most scholars have focused on diplomacy
and warfare, so much so that "grand strategy" has become almost an
equivalent of "military history." The traditional attention paid to
military affairs is understandable, but in today's world it leaves
out much else that could be considered political, and therefore
strategic. It is in fact possible to consider, and even reach, a
more capacious understanding of grand strategy, one that still
includes the battlefield and the negotiating table while expanding
beyond them. Just as contemporary world politics is driven by a
wide range of non-military issues, the most thorough considerations
of grand strategy must consider the bases of peace and
security-including gender, race, the environment, and a wide range
of cultural, social, political, and economic issues. Rethinking
American Grand Strategy assembles a roster of leading historians to
examine America's place in the world. Its innovative chapters
re-examine familiar figures, such as John Quincy Adams, George
Kennan, and Henry Kissinger, while also revealing the forgotten
episodes and hidden voices of American grand strategy. They expand
the scope of diplomatic and military history by placing the grand
strategies of public health, race, gender, humanitarianism, and the
law alongside military and diplomatic affairs to reveal hidden
strategists as well as strategies.
The first history of schooling gathered as a single and continuous text since the 1980s. It is also the first attempt to put together a history of South African schooling from the perspective of the subjugated people.
It attempts to show, as South Africa moves from a landscape essentially marked by encounters of people at different frontiers – physical, geographical, economic, cultural and psychological (where only the first two have previously received real attention) – how education is conceptualised, mobilised and used by all the players in the emerging country from the colonial Dutch and British periods into apartheid.
This book covers the period of the history of South African schooling from the establishment of the first school in 1658 to 1910 when South Africa became a Union. It approaches the task of narrating this history as a deliberate intervention. The intervention is that of restoring into the narrative the place of the subjugated people in the unfolding of a landscape which they share with a racialised white community. Propelled by a post-colonial framing of South Africa’s history, it offers itself as a deliberate counter to dominant historiographic and systematic privileging of the country’s elites. As such, it works on a larger canvas than simply the school. It deliberately works the story of schooling alongside the bigger socioeconomic history of South Africa, i.e., Dutch settlement of the Cape, the arrival of colonial Britain and the dramatic discovery of gold and diamonds leading to the industrialisation of South Africa. The story of schooling, the text seeks to emphasise, cannot be told independently of what is going on economically, politically and socially in the making of modern South Africa. Modernity, as a consequence, is a major theme of the book.
In telling the story of formal schooling in South Africa, the text, critically, seeks to retrieve the experience of the subjugated to present a wider and larger canvas upon which to describe the process of the making of the South African school. The text works historically with the Dutch East Indian experience up until 1804 when schooling was characterised by its neglect. It shows then how it develops a systematic character through the institutionalisation of a formal system in 1839 and the initiatives of missionaries. It draws the story to a close by looking at how formal systems are established in the colonies, the Boer Republics and the protectorates.
Thematically, the text seeks to thread through the conceits of race and class to show how, contradictorily, they take expression through conflict and struggle. In this conflict and struggle people who are not white (i.e., they do not yet have the racialised labels that apartheid brings in the middle of the 20th century) are systematically marginalised and discriminated against. They work with their discrimination, however, in generative ways by taking opportunity when it arises and exercising political agency.
The book is important because it explains the roots of educational inequality. It shows how inequality is systematically installed in almost every step of the way. For a period, in the middle of the 19th century, attempts were made to forestall this inequality. The text shows how the British administration acceded to eugenicist influences which pushed children of colour out of what were called first-class schools into segregated missionary-run institutions.
Contemporary scholarly and popular debate over the legacy of racial
integration in the United States rests between two positions that
are typically seen as irreconcilable. On one side are those who
argue that we must pursue racial integration because it is an
essential component of racial justice. On the other are those who
question the ideal of integration and suggest that its pursuit may
damage the very population it was originally intended to liberate.
In An Impossible Dream? Sharon A. Stanley shows that much of this
apparent disagreement stems from different understandings of the
very meaning of integration. In response, she offers a new model of
racial integration in the United States that takes seriously the
concerns of longstanding skeptics, including black power activists
and black nationalists. Stanley reformulates integration to
de-emphasize spatial mixing for its own sake and calls instead for
an internal, psychic transformation on the part of white Americans
and a radical redistribution of power. The goal of her vision is
not simply to mix black and white bodies in the same spaces and
institutions, but to dismantle white supremacy and create a genuine
multiracial democracy. At the same time, however, she argues that
achieving this model of integration in the contemporary United
States would be extraordinarily challenging, due to the poisonous
legacy of Jim Crow and the hidden, self-reinforcing nature of white
privilege today. Pursuing integration against a background of
persistent racial injustice might well exacerbate black suffering
without any guarantee of achieving racial justice or a worthwhile
form of integration. Given this challenge, pessimism toward
integration is a defensible position. But while the future of
integration remains uncertain, its pursuit can neither be
prescribed as a moral obligation nor rejected as intrinsically
indefensible. In An Impossible Dream? Stanley dissects this vexing
moral and political quandary.
The metaphor of 'state capture' has dominated South Africa's political discourse in the post-Zuma presidency era. What is state capture and how does it manifest? Is it just another example of a newly independent, failed African state? And is it unique to South Africa?
The contributors in this collection try to explain the phenomenon from a variety of viewpoints and disciplines. All hold fast to the belief that the democracy that promised the country so much when apartheid ended has been significantly eroded, resulting in most citizens expressing a loss of hope for the future. Read together, the essays cumulatively show not only how state capture was enabled and who benefitted, but also how and by whom it was scrutinised and exposed in order to hold those in power accountable.
The book aims to present a scholarly and empirical understanding of how things went awry, even with various regulating bodies in place, and how to prevent state capture from happening again in the future.
The study of institutions, a core concept in comparative politics,
has produced many rich and influential theories on the economic and
political effects of institutions, yet it has been less successful
at theorizing their origins. In Fixing Democracy, Javier Corrales
develops a theory of institutional origins that concentrates on
constitutions and levels of power within them. He reviews numerous
Latin American constituent assemblies and constitutional amendments
to explore why some democracies expand rather than restrict
presidential powers and why this heightened presidentialism
discourages democracy. His signal theoretical contribution is his
elaboration on power asymmetries. Corrales determines that
conditions of reduced power asymmetry make constituent assemblies
more likely to curtail presidential powers, while weaker opposition
and heightened power asymmetry is an indicator that presidential
powers will expand. The bargain-based theory that he uses focuses
on power distribution and provides a more accurate variable in
predicting actual constitutional outcomes than other approaches
based on functionalism or ideology. While the empirical focus is
Latin America, Fixing Democracy contributes a broadly applicable
theory to the scholarship both institutions and democracy.
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