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Throughout the later twentieth century, Britain's Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) sat at the heart of a transnational advocacy network. From the mid-1980s, the increased repression of child and youth activists in South Africa became a particular topic of concern for the AAM, which launched a campaign to investigate and globally disseminate information about the brutality inflicted against black children. This network, in both its formal and informal forms, helped to garner essential international support for young activists detained by the apartheid regime. Yet, as children and youth's own stories were collected and rewritten for global audiences, they were abstracted from their political and cultural contexts, simplified into neat binaries of right and wrong, and framed according particular areas of moral global concern. While this strategy earned the AAM unprecedented media and governmental attention, it simultaneously denied children's resilience and political agency. This case study thus reveals the asymmetrical functioning of many transnational advocacy networks, which despite their good intentions, tend to privilege the connected over the disconnected. Exploring the AAM through a network approach reveals a web of connections among multiple individuals, groups and geographical sites, which complicate spatial conceptions of empire and postcolonial humanitarianism. Such an approach to global history exposes not just how metropole and periphery were mutually constituted, but also how they were mis-constituted through uneven exchanges or overlooked connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a number of exponents of critical pedagogy argue that it is an appropriate framework for challenging dominant discourses that seek to perpetuate oppressive power relations and social inequalities, others have begun to counter-argue that it still remains a 'pedagogy of the oppressed'. By continuing to construct the 'world' as divided between binary oppositions of race, class, gender and ethnicity, critical pedagogy tends to gloss over more complex relations of power in which these categories are fluid rather than fixed. This article argues that in post-conflict situations such as post-apartheid South Africa, where the dividing line between perpetrators and victims tends to be blurred, the dividing line between oppressor and oppressed becomes less clear and more slippery. The article proposes the adoption of an alternative post-critical pedagogy that can transcend such rigid boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South African Truth and Reconciliation commission is one of the most talked about, innovative, but also highly controversial mechanisms used by a state 'in transition' to provide a form of accountability for its past perpetrators of human rights abuses. This article will, from the perspective of the victims of repression, critically analyse the benefits and drawbacks of the TRC's three primary processes - the amnesty hearings, the victims' hearings and the formulation of its policies on rehabilitation and reparation. This analysis provides some important lessons and recommendations for how the establishment and implementation of future truth commissions can maximise the benefits to those who have so often been forgotten in past attempts to establish accountability mechanisms namely, the victims and survivors of gross violations of human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the dynamics of ethnic collective action in the PWV area during the period 1970-1984. Ethnic collective is defined as collective action where groups use a set of ethnic markers such as skin colour and language, as a criterion for membership in the group/s making specific claims. A considerable amount of support was found for the arguments of the resource mobilization theory and the competition theory. It was also shown that labour market dynamics affect rates of protest and conflict events in different ways. The results reported here question the results of early research which suggest that repression has negative effects on rates of collective action. The results show that in most cases, repressive measures by the police at events of collective action significantly increased subsequent rates of collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]