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 m…

“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 deca…

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.
I first heard about Nkrumah from m…

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 th…

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 Comm…

We are delighted to announce that Peter Vale is to begin blogging on e-IR. Vale is the Nelson Mandela Chair of Politics at Rhodes University, South Africa, and has held visiting appointments as a Fellow at the International Centre for Advanced Studies, New York University, Professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is a…