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?
Yash Tandon -
The term apartheid describes a system of governance in South Africa from about 1948 when the Nationalist Party came to power to independence in 1994, but it has acquired a broader usage. “Global apartheid” was first used during the 1980s by scholars, but became famous when Thabo Mbeki, in 2001, explained why the 2006 World Cup was given to Germany, not South Africa, due to a New Zealander’s vote switch.
In 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, he defined...
Patrick Bond -
The decade since the Seattle World Trade Organisation (WTO) fiasco on November 30, 1999, taught civil society activists and African leaders two powerful lessons.
First, working together, they have the power to disrupt a system of global governance that meets the Global North’s short-term interests against both the Global South and the longer-term interests of the world’s people and the planet.
Second, in the very act of disrupting global malgovernance, major concessions can be...
Saliem Fakir -
Book Review
Book: Starved for Science - How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa
Author: Robert Paarlberg
Publisher: Harvard University Press
First Published: 2008
ISBN-10: 0674029739
David Edgerton, in his book, The Shock of the Old: Technology and global history since 1900 (2008), made a poignant observation: that often when used-based histories of technology are written, it is inevitable that in the name of progress, the new is always more advanced than the old and that...
WIDE ANGLE is a television programme of America's Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) that provides in-depth news coverage of international issues. This week it aired a programme about the foiled coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea, which included the involvement of South African mercenaries. The clip above, which makes for intriguing viewing on the scramble for oil in Africa, is an excerpt of the programme aired by the public broadcaster. PBS billed the programme as follows: "A...
Democracy Now -
American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, ended the South African leg of her African tour on Sunday, 09 August 2009, before jetting off to Angola and a further four African countries - the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Liberia and Cape Verde.
In light of Clinton's tour, last week Democracy Now published an interview with British anthropologist Jeremy Keenan, who talked about AFRICOM, the US military command in Africa -- an issue that's clouded the Clinton tour in many of the...
Speaking at a roundtable discussion last month on the topic "Challenging Militarism: Feminist Activism and Scholarship", Professor Fumi Olonisakin Director of the Conflict, Security and Development Group at Kings College, London, argued that global security changes brought about by 9/11, ended the process of post-Cold War demilitarization in Africa and "arrested" security sector reform, threatening democracy and civil society's calls for change on the continent....
