Please do not circulate or quote since this is work in progress. It is the draft of a book prospectus in the making. I hope that our discussion will help me to improve it.
The systemic nature of corruption in local government needs to be understood it terms of the social and economic forces acting on the state, particularly the formation of new classes and elites within the dynamics of the South African political transition.
This paper explores the financialisation of South African economy and society over the last forty years. Unlike the existing scholarship it argues that the development of a debt-based economy has little to do with the influence of mining capital, and that it is much better explained by the
My concern here is a small, but important slice of the South African Anthropocene: the undermining, by coal mining, of the sub-surface of Sasolburg, the South African company town set up in the 1950s by the apartheid state.
Kant’s philosophy centrally focusses on trying to give an a priori account of conditions of the possibility of various human phenomena, including metaphysics, empirical knowledge, there being moral reasons and the nature of just political power.
This paper investigates, theorises and seeks to understand the movement of womxn in and around Johannesburg—interrogating the politics of gender and sexuality as it relates to migration and mobility.
Historians of medicine in South Africa have demonstrated that in the late 19th and 20th centuries instances of South African medical research and clinical innovation gained global recognition, notably in malaria and tuberculosis work; in malnutrition and breastfeeding studies; in emergency medici
Debt cancellation and land redistribution were not just demands of revolutionary movements in ancient times. In South Africa redistribution of land is at the heart of contemporary activism, enlivened by recent moves towards a new Expropriation Bill.
Some historians of the British Empire have argued that the post-1857 Empire reflected a turn away from liberalism in favour of pre-existing sources of hegemony which were reactivated under colonialism and opposed the liberal rationalist agenda of imperialism with considerable success.
The chapter is part of my forthcoming book A Dam for Africa: The Volta River Project and Modernization in Ghana (Indiana University Press), which explores the history of the Akosombo Dam, the country’s largest development project, completed in 1965.
The history of South Africa’s major economic policy debates since the 1980s, as well as the related story of post-apartheid poverty and inequality statistics, could be fruitfully interpreted through the lens of financialization (Feher, Davis) and in light of the naked lo
This paper is a work in progress. I offer an ethnographic account of everyday encounters with the state in Cameroon that, following Harold D. Lasswell, I describe as a garrison state.
The article explores the transfer of knowledge and technological innovation by Eskom, the state owned vertically integrated South African power utility in South Africa and the rest of the continent in the period between 1997 and 2005 as forms of techno-nationalism, techno-globalisation and techno
In the aftermath of the Angola's twenty-seven year civil war, the Angolan state launched a countrywide 'national reconstruction' programme, investing in large-scale infrastructure and housing as a means, it claimed, of stabilising the economy and reversing the worst material effects o
This paper considers two questions: 1) can ethnography be used to understand global processes or is its rootedness in time and place fatal? 2) What is policing - who exercises power through it and to what ends?
For a long time measuring and thus shaping populations was a privilege of governments and an articulation of sovereignty. It was mainly governments who could establish the necessary infrastructure to quantify population.
Whilst social protection policy has long been shaped and sometimes driven by international or transnational actors, in the 2000s these actors assumed new importance.
Speculative fiction is one of the most diverse and complex genres of African literature today. Its contributors come from all across Sub-Saharan Africa, and the range of topic covered is astounding.
This paper examines ideas about solidarity that have been generated by the South African government’s proposals to create a National Health Insurance (NHI) Fund.
As part of a larger project on a global history and critique of “efficiency”, in this presentation I argue that the plantation constitutes a model of “development” that still haunts us.
This paper examines the formation and early development of the University of Dar es Salaam and the University of Zambia in relation to the larger project of producing a professional workforce for nation building in Tanzania and Zambia.
Wage work, it is said, is disappearing in the “ new ” age of capital, to rising alarm across the world. Yet there is little agreement about why, where, or in what measure. Or what might take its place in the fore- seeable future.
In this paper, I outline a certain landscape of the judicialization of health in South Africa. The “judicialization of health” refers to ways in which claims to health are made through the law (Biehl and Petryna 2011).
This paper is a work-in-progress. It arises from a larger study of what the medical literature labels “metabolic disorders” in different African sites that has expanded into a consideration of metabolic systems as social as well as biological phenomena.
From the 1960s to the present, South Africa offered a site for neoliberals to think through the conditions necessary to preserve the market order, especially under conditions of what they perceived as the problem of white minority and even white decline.
This paper takes a fresh look at the relationship between the ANC and the Soviet Union, using archival records, interviews, and memoirs from both South Africa and Russia.
This paper examines the ways in which the people of northern Tshwane mediate their exclusions through engaging with the Mabopane Station to reach different places and to carry out socio-economic activities at the Station itself.
Ibn Rushd’s the Decisive Treatise (1126–98) is widely acknowledged as an important text for understanding his legal ideas, with some scholars describing this text as a legal opinion (fatwa) issued for the Malikite jurists of that period.
