Not a stone’s throw from where we do our grocery shopping, I heard the BBC describe the opening of the Summer Olympic Games. I say ‘heard’ because, in those grim days, South Africa’s isolation meant that major sporting events  — what we today call “global” events  – were scarcely mentioned on the bulletins which passed for news as apartheid was making its last ugly stand.
The memory of that particular September Saturday has much been with me this past week as the FIFA 2010 World Cup has exploded in this country and, if what I see on the news-channels is to believed, seems to have done so pretty much elsewhere too – well, elsewhere, except in Burma which seems to be as isolated as was apartheid South Africa in 1988.
If you think I’m overstating the case about the explosion of “World Cup-fever” – as the press headlined it a…

“The road less travelled ” – the American poet Robert Frost’s iconic metaphor has been much on my mind these past months as we have celebrated the 20th Anniversary of the fall of Berlin’s famous Wall; this, and the idea that politics, like people, is a great follower of fashion. Difficult as it is to believe, Fascism was as fashionable in the 1930s, as African liberation was three decades later — and as fashionable as over throwing doctorial regimes was twenty years ago.
When the Cold War ended three multi-ethnic, multi-racial and federally-inclined states faced an uncertain future. They were the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and South Africa. History records that the first two broke apart: the latter, of course, didn’t.
The years since have not been easy years for these countries, but my impression after a recent visit to the Balkans was that that the road South Africa travelled “has…

As I’ve hacked my way through the thicket of the Great Debates these thirty-odd years past, I’ve increasingly wondered what my students must have made of my passion for ideas which appear at odds with the lives they lead – even, indeed, the countries they have come to know.

The recent centenary of the birth of Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana, passed without murmur in this little corner of the continent. Why this happened has both puzzled and, yes, hurt me a little. Whatever one thinks of the demons that drove the later years of Nkrumah’s leadership of Ghana, he was an inspiring figure in liberation circles.

For my sins – of which there are many – cartoons have been much in my head in recent weeks. Let me explain: for too many years, I’ve been working on a book on a centenary of cartoons on South Africa’s international relations. With the Centenary just five months away, I’ve been galvanised into doing something about it. So, running around my house for the past few months have been endless ‘toons much to my wife’s chagrin. I’d thought however that this was just to be one aging IR-hack’s indulgence until I read Anca Pusca’s interesting and thoughtful Review Essay on Walter Benjamin in the most recent edition of International: Political Sociology (Vol. 3. No. 2. June 2009). (What a great journal this has turned out to be: take a bow Didier Bigo and Rob Walker!)
Benjamin has always interested me but I’ve always thought that he was at some…

The 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall offers has understandably generated a number of opportunities to look backwards to what happened, and to ask why it was that IR specialists seemed unable to see what was coming.
Some weeks ago, I chaired a meeting between two Cold War former foes – one a leading member of South Africa’s apartheid order; the other, a Communist, a member of the African National Congress (ANC). They’d met before, of course, during the negotiations which led to the ending of apartheid.
But the question at hand – What impact did the Fall of the Berlin Wall have on South Africa’s settlement – has not previously been discussed. Both participants were rather dismissive of the question, believing (as do many) that the mechanism for change in the country – the development of a network of negotiations at home and abroad – predated…

South Africa’s general election which was held on April 22 has yielded the proverbial ‘win-win’ situation for all the participants except the tiny parties, who failed to impress voters and whose futures now hang in the balance. Although this outcome-and the peaceful and well-organised poll-augur well for democracy in the former apartheid state, many still believe that the country’s fifteen year-old democracy may be in peril.

The violent attacks on foreigners which broke out in South Africa in late-May, resulted in 50 deaths and many more injured and displaced. What has become of the idea of the Rainbow Nation, the triumphant trope broadcast by the irrepressible Nobel Laureate, Desmond Tutu, and in which all the country’s people, under the forgiving leadership of Nelson Mandela, rejoiced?