March 2013

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Idasa's Demise, Broken Donor Promises and Africa's Naive Civil Society

Picture: Idasa Alexander O'Riordan - In a March 26 press statement, the Executive Director of The Institute for Democracy in Africa (Idasa), Paul Graham, announced that the venerable South African democratisation and rights organisation would be closing. Idasa has been in existence for over twenty years, played an important role at the end of apartheid and is a major loss to civil society in South Africa. However, it is also important internationally. Idasa is one of the widely recognised African democratisation and rights...

Johannesburg Academic Denied Entry to Palestine Recounts Experience of Interrogation by Israeli Soldiers

Picture: SACSIS Video Dr. Salim Vally, director of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg, was recently invited by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation's Jerusalem office to visit Palestine and deliver a series of lectures, including a keynote address at Birzeit University in Ramallah. He was unfortunately detained by Israeli soldiers at the Allenby Bridge border crossing between Jordan and Palestine. After a five hour ordeal, which included an interrogation and a strip...

BRICS Go Over the Wall

Picture: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and SA Pepe Escobar - Reports on the premature death of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have been greatly exaggerated. Western corporate media is flooded with such nonsense, perpetrated in this particular case by the head of Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Reality spells otherwise. The BRICS meet in Durban, South Africa, this Tuesday to, among other steps, create their own credit rating agency, sidelining the dictatorship - or at least "biased agendas", in New Delhi's...

The Somaliazation of Syria

Picture: Scott Bob, Voice of America News/Wikimedia Giorgio Cafiero - As Syria’s civil war enters its third year, the country's humanitarian crisis worsens each day and the Levant grows increasingly vulnerable to the conflict's spillover. In mid-February, the United Nations reported a death toll “nearing 70,000.” Today, one in four Syrians is internally displaced or living abroad as a refugee. No dialogue between the Assad regime and rebels has begun, as the gulf between the two sides’ conditions for talks has proven too wide to...

Policing the Neo-colony

Picture: National Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega courtesy GovernmentZA/Flickr. Richard Pithouse - In the colonies ….the agents of government speak the language of pure force. - Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961 All societies are managed with a mixture of force and consent. But in South Africa like, say, India or Mexico, violence, or the threat of violence, is woven so tightly into the banalities and intimacies of day to day life that it is part of the deep structure of things. And it is not simply a matter, as many politicians would like us to believe, of criminality...

Absurdism and Class Privilege: The 'Harlem Shake' Internet Sensation

Picture: As seen on You Tube. Video When five teenagers in Queensland, Australia uploaded a video of themselves dancing to a short excerpt of Baauer’s song “Harlem Shake” it immediately went viral, garnering some 400 million views and spawning well over 100,000 copycat versions. We've posted the "Harlem Shake Special Firefighter and Ambulance Edition" above. However, in an article published by New Left Project, Jason Hickel and Arsalan Khan, critique the "Harlem Shake". Beneath the...