Geography Archives: South Africa

Far-reaching strategic debate is underway about how to respond to the global financial crisis, and indeed how the North’s problems can be tied into a broader critique of capitalism. The 2008 world financial meltdown has its roots in the neoliberal export-model (dominant in Africa since the Berg Report and onset of structural adjustment during the […]

Labor unions around the world have reacted to the financial crisis and the economic recession with words and actions reflecting their national experience, their political ideology, and their leaderships. Unions and workers have already seen the financial crisis and the growing recession result in the closing of plants and offices, in shorter workweeks, pay cuts, […]

For the last several months, headlines about the global financial crisis have regularly made the front pages of international newspapers.  Over this period, Europe and the US have come to realise that corporations are facing the worst economic crisis since the 1929 crash.  In South Africa, however, articles on the global crisis have tended to […]

Of all the people I interviewed for my book, Inside the Red Zone, the words of one have never left me. In a little farming village 50 miles north of Baghdad, I spoke with a local sheik who described his arrest and detention by the U.S. Army.  For two weeks, he and a dozen other […]

Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, This Regime Which Is Not One: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River (1967 – ), Resling, 2008. Listen to the Alternative Information Center’s interview with Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir about their book This Regime Which Is Not One. First, an anecdote.  A couple of weeks ago […]

  Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa.  Madison University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.  342 pp.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-299-21950-5. In the 1970s and 1980s, an edited volume focused entirely on African colonial intermediaries such as interpreters, translators, clerks, and secretaries would not have aroused much interest from historians of […]

Reading Shlomo Sand‘s book When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? (Resling, 2008), I realized that there are actually several, not all related, arguments and debates within it.  In other words, it does not have one thesis that can be accepted or rejected as a whole, but an attempt to address various historical issues […]

It is about time that Jews spoke out strongly and decisively against Zionism, and the newly announced International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) is trying to do just that. IJAN is moving towards an “offensive” against Zionism rather than the customary “reactionism,” responding to outrages, which characterizes most solidarity work. This offensive takes two routes: A […]

  For years, the U.S. never considered Africa as a priority foreign policy agenda.  The only context in which Africa came up in Washington was for preferential trade as in AGOA (Africa Growth & Opportunity Act) or in AIDS funding from PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and of course humanitarian assistance.  Despite its […]

Sunday afternoon, October 5th, 2008, a moment at the height of a global credit crisis, the like of which has not been seen by anyone under the age of eighty.  The time will come when calm has returned, and when we at Monthly Review will point to a record over the last several years of […]

The past week has been a wild roller-coaster ride in and out of Southern African ruling-party politics, down the troughs of world capitalism, and up the peaks of radical social activism.  Glancing around the region and world from those peaks, we can see quite a way further than usual. Looking first to South Africa, Saturday’s […]

While taking a significant toll on public revenues,1 repayment of the public debt has, since 2004, ceased to be a major concern for most middle-revenue countries and for raw material-exporting countries in general.  In fact the majority of governments of these countries are having no trouble finding loans at historically low interest rates.  However, the […]

  Nothing expresses the widening gap between the mind frames of the Iranian ruling elite and their Western counterparts more than the headlines in their respective newspapers.  The American media, above all, have unilaterally resolved the intelligence questions over Iran’s nuclear program.  The New York Times leads the pack with articles and even editorials that […]

  You’ll be familiar with the story.  An evil or crazy (the two are interchangeable) maniac is trying to destroy the American way of life, sowing destruction in an American city, blowing up American buildings, killing American citizens.  We stand amidst the rubble, watching the firemen, wondering what happened.  This man is demented, unreasonable; he […]

For some, Barack Obama’s stature as a man of the Left has fallen precipitously, like late autumn leaves shed by branches bowing to the will of winter. Disappointment has often been self-inflicted.  Supporters have dipped their pens deeply into the inkwell of Obama’s inspiring story and written their own lines on Afghanistan, oil drilling, or […]

Introduction Despite the vast literature examining the link between trade liberalization and economic growth, empirical studies still fail to provide conclusive and unequivocal evidence supporting the link.  What most of these studies emphasize is that openness, accompanied by a country-specific mix of appropriate complementary policies (macroeconomic and financial policies, education, infrastructure, institutional capacity and governance), […]

Statistically, South Africa produces enough food to feed its entire population, and in most years it is even a net exporter of food.1  There is, therefore, not a shortage of food in South Africa.  Yet if you walk through the streets of any township or rural village in the country, you will find hungry people […]

Negotiations between the MDC and ZANU-PF over the political future of Zimbabwe have reached a zenith in the past few weeks.  It now seems almost inevitable that some sort of deal will be attained by the political masters of the MDC and ZANU and that power sharing will become a reality.  The mediator in the […]

Efforts to beat the drums of war for an attack on Iran’s nuclear reactor facilities are promoted in both the USA and Israel scenes.  The recent New York Times opinion piece of July 18th, written by the Israeli historian Benny Morris, serves to consolidate those political forces.  The Jewish opposition here expresses our outrage in […]

Note on the Status of CCS within the University of KwaZulu-Natal On 30 July, the staff of the Centre for Civil Society and our host institution, the School of Development Studies (SDS), were summoned by Dean Donal McCracken, and told that as of 31 December 2008, CCS would be permanently closed, that Professor Patrick Bond […]