Search

This piece, by Celine Kelly, is a report on a paper that was presented at the JSI 2013 in Melbourne and explores the key points made by Andrew Godwin on the globalisation and liberalisation of legal services in the Australasia region. The talk included a discussion on the pros and cons of globalisation and case studies of legal services in South Korea, Singapore, Japan, China, India and Australia.

POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND GLOBALIZATION Cherry I Walker. Land-Marked: Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana Media; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. xii + 292 pp. Abbreviations. Maps. Photographs. Tables. Appendixes. Endnotes. Bibliography. Index. $26.95. Paper. Aninka Claassens and Ben Cousins, eds. Land, Power and Custom: Controversies Generated by South Africa's Communal Land Rights Act. Published for the Legal Resources Centre. Cape Town: UCT Press; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. xv + 392 pp. DVD. Maps. Abbreviations, Contributors. Notes. Tables. References. Index. $34.95. Paper. These two books are indispensable additions to the core literature on land reform in South Africa. In their different approaches and structures, they both offer a creative mix of academic insights and the entrenched experience of activists, and of local case studies with a wealth of concrete sociological detail alongside broad discourses on modes of analysis on a national and continental scale. They each concentrate on one element of what Cherryl Walker refers to as "the three-legged cooking pot" of land reform policy initiated in 1994: the Restitution Programme and the attempt to reform land tenure in the former Ban tus tans, respectively. Neither covers the third leg of redistribution (the transfer of former white-owned farmland to black occupants), which is the leg that has received most attention and funding - although some of Cherryl Walker's general evaluations do extend to cover it. Indeed, her somewhat skeptical and cautious overall conclusions about the future of land reform apply to both redistribution and restitution plans. Walker's account of restitution provides a look back to the origins of today's problem in previous decades when the injustices of forced removals occurred. Her study is enriched by personal accounts from this period, when she was a "participant observer" working to resist the removals. She supplies a similar insider's account of the first stage of the restitution program, but this time from a position within the new state as the commissioner for land claims in Kwazulu-Natal. Since moving into academia after 2000, her work has continued to benefit from a third perspective, that of academic researcher. The book thus juxtaposes and interrelates the three elements and perspectives: emotive personal memories and indelible images of dispossession; a planner's account of the mechanisms and frustrations of restitution; and the evaluation of the record. The memories from long ago of a litde girl lost in a removal suggest the ways in which such incidents became the currency of a historical narrative at the heart of the rhetoric of national liberation; at the same time, they provide a measure of success or failure and serve to remind us of the complex reality covered up by the national myth. The approach embodied in this fusion of perspectives serves in turn as an explanation of why the restitution program failed. Over and above the occasional lack of political will, the over-bureaucratization and inefficiency, and the mistaken policy formulations (all of which are acknowledged in the account), Walker sees inherent conflicts in the dual goals of reversing injustice and stimulating rural development oriented toward the poor: limits to what can be achieved and how quickly these goals can be achieved via restitution. …

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY Paula Heinonen. Youth Gangs and Street Children: Culture, Nurture and Masculinity in Ethiopia. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. vii + 180 pp. Bibliography. Index. $99.00. Cloth. $25.00. Paper.During the 1990s and 2000s many countries in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world experienced an explosion of street children and youth gangs in their urban centers. Scholars and other observers attribute the increase in the number of children and youth making a living and/or living on the streets to myriad causes: poverty, structural adjustment policies and other forces of globalization, drought, famine, floods, political instability, and civil wars. Paralleling the growth of these groups, Paula Heinonen notes in Youth Gangs and Street Children in Ethiopia: Culture, Nurture and Masculinity, has been an explosion in the growth of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) whose mission it is to address the needs of these children and their families. These NGOs, along with scholars, the media, and polidcians in industrialized countries, typically portray street children and their families as dysfunctional, their lives dominated by violence, neglect, abuse, and low levels of education and health care. Solutions usually involve a combination of social welfare schemes and law enforcement which, even when implemented, barely scratch the surface of the problem.In her study of homeless street gangs and home-living street children in Ethiopia, Heinonen argues that most of what we know and understand about these young people is a distortion. Based on six years of field work in Addis Ababa, Youth Gangs and Street Children in Ethiopia provides a careful ethnographic examination of the lives of male and female children as many of them passed from childhood to adulthood and parenthood before Heinonen's eyes. There is violence, to be sure, but it comes mostly from the police, members of the public, and fellow gang members. The street children in her study lived with their families (a limitation of the study, as this is not necessarily representative of street children, generally, throughout the world). They were entrepreneurial and often parented their siblings and even their parents. Many attended school, using their trading and other earnings to pay their school fees. Street gang members did not find the gang to be a substitute family, as much of the literature asserts. Instead, the street gang members among whom Heinonen worked "were not only at odds with one another most of the time, but frequently went in and out of groups" (2-3). Gang violence was often perpetrated against female gang members, who were sexually abused, sexually exploited, and raped by male gang members, particularly in mixed-sex gangs.Heinonen found that central to understanding the lives of street children and youth gangs in Ethiopia-their livelihoods, criminal activities, and interactions with one another, with parents, and with other members of their communities-is the concept of yilunta (shame, honor, or family pride), which "promotes hegemonic masculinity within the 'wider Ethiopian' culture and accounts for the gendered nature of how Ethiopian children are socialized and how gang members operate" (8). …

Tom Lodge. Politics in South Africa: From Mandela to Mbeki. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. vi + 314 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $19.95. Paper. Gillian Hart. Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xi + 385 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $21.95. Paper. It has now been a decade since South Africa emerged from its authoritarian and apartheid past. Inevitably, political scientists pose certain questions: How has South Africa weathered the transition to democratic and free market reform, and where does the "New South Africa" fit into the larger discourse on globalization and neoliberal capitalism? Gillian Hart and Tom Lodge offer two perspectives on these questions, and suggest that South Africa represents an important model for understanding the challenges that face transitional societies seeking to achieve rapid pursuit of free market democracy. Lodge takes a macro approach to analyzing the South African state, focusing on the political forces affecting the national government's leadership as it reshapes the economic and social framework of the country. Hart utilizes a micro analysis that places two communities within the KwaZulu-Natal province under scrutiny to determine why such geographically similar locales developed such different trajectories in their political and economic development. Both authors devote substantial attention to the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) developed in the early 1990s by the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa's governing party, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). The RDP proposes that growth can be combined with development by (1) meeting basic needs, (2) upgrading human resources, (3) strengthening the economy, (4) democratizing the state and society, and (5) reorganizing the state and the public sector. Lodge examines how the RDP quickly came to represent different things to different people inside South Africa, but by any measure there is little dispute that substantial progress has been made in South Africa in the areas of housing, clean water, electrification, primary health care, and public works. In 1996 the South African government formally adopted a package of economic policies known as GEAR (Growth, Employment, and Redistribution). While Lodge notes the general success of these policies across South Africa as a whole, Hart shows that these policies affected Ladysmith-Ezakheni and Newcastle-Madadeni in very different and sometimes contradictory ways. Part of the explanation for these differences derives from the personalities resident in these communities. …

This article is an initial scoping exercise for a research agenda on the international political economy of ageing. It begins with a brief review of the various critiques of the political economy perspective that have been made over the 25 years since the first article on the subject. Remarkable for its absence has been criticism of the neglect of an explicit international perspective. Then the article emphasises that it is not globalisation per se that is problematic but its dominant neo-liberal economic form. It is mainly because of this globalisation and the related growth in the power of international governmental organisations, such as The World Bank, that an international political economy of ageing is required. The bulk of the article is devoted to an outline of the eight key elements that might comprise a theoretical and empirical research agenda for social gerontology. These key elements are: global inequality in old age, development and ageing, globalism and the power of international governmental organisations, trans-national corporations, the nation state, supra-national regional structures, the United Nations, and international non-governmental organisations. In the spirit of the other articles that have celebrated the journal's 25th anniversary, this paper is intended to stimulate scientific debate.

Review of: Hoad, N., 2007. 'African intimacies: race, homosexuality, and globalization'. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND GLOBALIZATION Ian Scoones, Nelson M a ron g we, Biasio Mavedzenge, Jacob Mahenehene, Felix Murimbarimba and Crispen Sukume. Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myths and Realities. Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey; Harare: Weaver Press; Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2010. xv + 288 pp. Bibliography. Index, f 16.99, $29.95, R1 75.00. Paper. One of the clear aims of this interesting and controversial book by Scoones et al. is to challenge five somewhat overstated myths that have dominated representations of Zimbabwe's post-2000 land reform. These are (1) that the land reform has been a total failure; (2) that the beneficiaries of this reform have been largely political "cronies" of the former ruling party, Zanu PF; (3) that there has been no investment in the new resetdement areas; (4) that agriculture in general is in complete ruins and has created chronic food insecurity; and (5) that the rural economy has collapsed. Challenges are made on the basis of detailed empirical research conducted over the past decade on "what has happened in the new resettiements" in Zimbabwe since 2000, and specifically in Masvingo Province in the country's dry southeast. The book's overall emphasis is explicidy on the "changing livelihoods of people who gained land" (31) - notably, not on those who didn't - and according to the authors, their data represent the "ground-level, field realities" that most others have failed to examine or acknowledge. These realities (in the Masvingo area, which differs markedly from many other parts of the country) are revealed through a combination of thematic lenses and linked sets of empirically oriented questions addressed in nine of the book's eleven chapters. (The other two are an introductory chapter that discusses debates on land reform and agrarian paths more generally, and a concluding chapter that revisits the five myths and explores "lessons" and policy priorities for supporting developments in the new resetdements.) Among other things, our attention is drawn to the varied origins and motivations of new setders and forms of land occupation across different sites, and the fragmented nature of the newly emerging agrarian structures (chapter 2). We learn of significant differentiation among households, substantial mobility on and off the schemes, including cross-border migration, and multiple livelihood strategies, which together have resulted in both "successes" and "failures" (chapters 3 and 8). Claims are made of unexpected if uneven levels of investment in plots, some production successes, the emergence of various agriculture-related enterprises, and new dynamics of "accumulation from below" (chapters 4, 5, and 10). This is despite a climate of sustained economic crisis and what is referred to as a "vacuum in policy thinking" (235) - here, the authors carefully side-step naming a highly party-politicized if not militarized policy sphere since 2000. In addition, we learn about the "highly complex rural labour market" (139) in the new resetdements (chapter 6), which the authors argue counters an over-emphasis by others on displacement and job losses. We also discover how land reform has altered the way in which "real markets" operate (chapter 7), with new commodity chains "opening opportunities for some and closing options for others" (149). Finally, the research reveals the complex struggles over territory, structure, and authority occurring in the new resetdements, and the surfacing of "hybrid" forms of governance that pose key challenges for state-making as well as for agricultural development (chapter 9). …

RELIGION Peter Paris, ed. Religion and Poverty: Pan-African Perspectives. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2009. xxiv + 360 pp. Notes. Contributors. Index. $89.95. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. According to the foreword by Jacob Olupona, this book represents a culmination of several Ford Foundation-sponsored seminars, lectures, and discussions held over the course of four years in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Jamaica, and the United States, where various academics of religion and society interrogated issues related to the causes of poverty and the intersection between poverty and religion among African peoples, with an attendant focus on "poverty alleviation." As suggested, too, in Esther Mombo's chapter, "Religion and Materiality: The Case of Poverty Alleviation," the inference is that "poverty eradication" is viewed as a distant ideal, and that food aid and other philanthropic antihunger organizations are forced to accept poverty alleviation as the only feasible goal, given the widening chasm under globalization and neocolonialism between the haves and have-nots in the world, particularly in Africa and the African diaspora. One does wonder, though, how, if organizations like the World Bank and the IMF advance antipoor policies like Structural Adjustment that in fact exacerbate poverty, the same organizations could be expected to alleviate poverty in "partnership with religious organizations, particularly churches" (xvii). A further question is "Why do religious traditions not demand the outright eradication of poverty as a sine qua non for ethical existence of their various adherents in the world?" Perhaps writers like Kossi Ayedze in the chapter "Poverty among African People and the Ambiguous Role of Christian Thought," who proposes a materially oriented Christian gospel that caters to both souls and bodies (208), make us realize that Christian theologians still struggle with the injunction of Jesus to surrender everything to the poor and live a materially and spiritually selfless life. But the question still remains: Why does poverty exist in the world and Africa in particular, to the point that the modest United Nations Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty by half by 2015 is now viewed as unrealistic and unattainable? Religion and Poverty is a broad-based text that charts the historical roots of poverty in Africa and the diaspora through genocidal processes like the trade in enslaved Africans from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries (see Katie Cannon's chapter, "An Ethical Mapping of the Transatlantic Slave Trade," and Barbara Bailey's instructive discussion of the subjugation particularly of women, "Feminization of Poverty Across Pan African Societies: The Church's Response - Alleviative or Emancipatory?"). The book highlights the challenges of economic globalization, which champions the transnational spread of corporate capitalism at the expense of informal entrepreneurs, especially women, who foster the survival of millions of families, youth, and children in the underdeveloped world (see 'The Informal Economy and the Religion of Global Capital" by the South African theologian Takatso Mofokeng), and it also investigates the contradictions between such imported notions and indigenous African religiocultural understandings - as, for example, in Maasai practice - that decry poverty and require collective access to land that cannot be owned (see Elizabeth Amoah's "African Traditional Religion and the Concept of Poverty"). …

There is no shortage of research that purports to tell us something new about globalization and its varied impacts on domestic politics and international relations today. Moreover, students mining this literature continue to find a broad spectrum of opinion on globalization, from those offering a strong state thesis that seemingly willfully ignores the many interdependent relationships states are entangled in today, to those embracing a weak state thesis that accepts the erosion of state sovereignty as a given. Edward Cohen's new book avoids these analytical traps, as he navigates through both popular and academic debates on globalization to produce a well-rounded and useful picture of a prosperous and hegemonic United States nonetheless increasingly agitated and divided internally over trade, immigration, and language policy at the end of the twentieth century.