The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
SACSIS seeks to examine global issues, particularly as they relate to South Africa.
Richard Pithouse -
Since the 1920s Charleston has been the name of a dance, a dance with roots in Africa and made white and famous on Broadway. Now Charleston is the name of a massacre, the murder of nine people and the desecration of the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Charleston was founded as Charles Town in 1670 when Charles II of England granted land in Carolina to some of his supporters after he was restored to the throne. The city, and its putative Southern gentility, was built on...
Michael Sullivan -
It’s not often that the Dalai Lama calls out a fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
But that’s what happened at the end of May when he was asked about Aung San Suu Kyi, who has declined to speak out on the worsening plight of the Rohingya minority in her homeland of Myanmar.
The Rohingya are Muslims who have lived for generations in mostly Buddhist Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. They are concentrated in the western part of the country, near the border with Bangladesh. They...
Tom Mills & Gilbert Achcar -
Last week Foreign Policy magazine published a piece by Robert Kaplan which argued that an upsurge in violence in the Arab World was the outcome of a decline in ‘America’s great power role in organizing and stabilizing the region’, as well as a legacy of Ottoman and European imperialism. ‘Imperialism may have fallen out of fashion,’ the subheading read, ‘but history shows that the only other option is the kind of chaos we see today. ’ Such...
Steve Ellner -
Leftists in Venezuela put forward a number of different explanations for the pressing economic difficulties and growing discontent that beset the nation and increase the possibility of an opposition takeover of the National Assembly in this year’s elections. High on list of explanations is an unfavourable comparison between the charisma and political acumen of Hugo Chávez and the inferior leadership qualities of his successor, President Nicolás Maduro. (This same line of...
Walden Bello -
The late Singapore strongman Lee Kuan Yew famously argued that Asia was no place for liberal democracy. Instead, he argued for a kind of soft authoritarianism guided by “Asian values,” where the harmony of a one-party state trumped the messiness of competitive elections.
For years, many of his peers seemed to agree.
Then, when Burma’s military took its baby steps away from dictatorship four years ago, it seemed that in a region where the merits of authoritarianism and...
Roisin Davis -
It’s been an astonishing election, one that stumped the betting markets, gave victory to the Tories and left almost everyone else reeling and wondering, in the words of Dorothy Parker, “What fresh hell is this?”
Amid the highest voter turnout since 1997, Prime Minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party trounced the opposition to return with a majority 331 seats (out of 650). Ed Miliband (Labour) and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrats) have now resigned as leaders of...
