"Between civil society and the state: a case study of the Bellville South Civic, 1980-1993"

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 199

Developing research excellence in transnational research collaborations : a reflection paper for the IDRC / COADY 2013 Canadian Learning Forum

This short reflection paper summarises lessons learnt about research excellence from the Citizenship-DRC network (“Development Research Centre on Citizenship, Participation and Accountability” or, Citizenship-DRC) and the emerging Collaboration for Research on Democracy (CORD) network. Both examples show how global research networks in development can challenge older, received models of North-South research partnerships. In the Citizenship-DRC network, over 150 locally-grounded cases were produced and synthesised in six volumes. In this report, some indicators are proposed that reflect excellence in the networked approach to research

Introduction: The Crucial Role of Mediators in Relations between States and Citizens

This book sets out to answer a deceptively simple question: how do citizens and state engage in the global south? The answer is not simple; it is indeed complex and multifaceted, but we argue that much of the time this engagement involves a practice of intermediation. From local to international level, citizens are almost always represented to the state through third parties that are distinguished by the intermediary role that they play. These intermediaries include political parties, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), community-based organisations, social movements, armed non-state actors, networks and individuals. For its part, the state often engages citizens through intermediaries from private service providers to civil society activists and even local militia

The limits of participatory democracy and the rise of the informal politics of mediated representation in South Africa

In general, South Africans view the formal participatory institutions of their state as ineffective mechanisms for the realization of their demands. Conversely, the reach of formalized civil society is limited in terms of policy impact, and social movements have little presence on the ground outside of the larger townships of the major metropolitan cities. In this context, the tensions between communities, civil society actors, and the state, often linked to enduring forms of poor governance, are increasingly played out in non-state and extra-institutional arenas, sometimes through the idiom of protest. Marginalized communities rely on various kinds of informal political practices to access rights and services from the state, or even to keep the state at bay. This emerging informal politics, and the associated forms of mediated representation, speaks to an ever-widening legitimacy gap between state and society, and with it, an ever-precarious participatory project

AIDS Activism and Globalisation from Below: Occupying New Spaces of Citizenship in Post-apartheid South Africa

Former President Nelson Mandela, Bono, Peter Gabriel and other superstars stood together on the stage at Greenpoint StadiuminCape Town in front of billions of television viewers around the world, watching the “46664”music extravaganza in support of the fight against AIDS in Africa. AIDS is clearly a global pandemic and responses to it have inevitably been on a global scale. At the same time, the disease has highly localised aspects to it. AIDS activists have had to address both the global dimensions and the local specificities of this epidemic

The tale of two publics: Media, political representation and citizenship in Hout Bay,

This chapter makes the case that access to the spaces of public debate in post-apartheid South Africa is about the challenge of political representation as much as it is about the challenge of access to communication technologies. These representational issues centre on the racialised and partisan nature of state-society relations framed, in part, through identity discourses and, for many poor citizens, patronage politics linked to local governance. In the urban setting this often also takes a spatial form linked to the neighbourhood or community, and involves local leaders who invoke the exclusive right to mediate for poor and marginalised groups in the name of liberation nationalism and service delivery – elsewhere termed the politics of the ‘party-society’