God Save the King: Letter from Swaziland

Swaziland has for the past 300 years been subject to royal rule. The ruling monarch, King Mswati III, has been living in disconnect with his subjects and has failed to modernize the monarchy. In the midst of this regime that is still dictatorial and fails to abide by the constitution, unrest is slowly brewing in the tiny and mountainous country. With the present political climate of long-standing rulers being toppled, are the king's days numbered

Thirty-six years of Mugabe and why he remains

Zoe Samudzi discusses the political staying power of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe

Cisgender male and transgender female sex workers in South Africa: gender variant identities and narratives of exclusion

Sex workers are often perceived as possessing ‘deviant’ identities, contributing to their exclusion from health services. The literature on sex worker identities in relation to health has focused primarily on cisgender female sex workers as the ‘carriers of disease’, obscuring the experiences of cisgender male and transgender sex workers and the complexities their gender identities bring to understandings of stigma and exclusion. To address this gap, this study draws on 21 interviews with cisgender male and transgender female sex workers receiving services from the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce in Cape Town, South Africa. Our findings suggest that the social identities imposed upon sex workers contribute to their exclusion from public, private, discursive and geographic spaces. While many transgender female sex workers described their identities using positive and empowered language, cisgender male sex workers frequently expressed shame and internalised stigma related to identities, which could be described as ‘less than masculine’. While many of those interviewed felt empowered by positive identities as transgender women, sex workers and sex worker-advocates, disempowerment and vulnerability were also linked to inappropriately masculinised and feminised identities. Understanding the links between gender identities and social exclusion is crucial to creating effective health interventions for both cisgender men and transgender women in sex work

Human Rights and German Intellectual History in Transnational Perspective

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156446/1/gequ12147.pd

Analysis of crystallization data the Protein Data Bank

The Protein Data Bank (PDB) is the largest available repository of solved protein structures and contains a wealth of information on successful crystallization. Many centres have used their own experimental data to draw conclusions about proteins and the conditions in which they crystallize. Here, data from the PDB were used to reanalyse some of these results. The most successful crystallization reagents were identified, the link between solution pH and the isoelectric point of the protein was investigated and the possibility of predicting whether a protein will crystallize was explored

Capturing German South West Africa: Racial Production, Land Claims, and Belonging in the Afterlife of the Herero and Nama Genocide

Because its geographic reach was not as vast as Britain, France, or Spain's, Imperial Germany is often rendered to the marginalia of colonial historiography. Yet Germany’s colonial endeavors, specifically its genocidal war against the Ovaherero and Nama (1904-1908) in German South West Africa is critically important as an expression of Lebensraum, a geopolitical understanding of ethnic identity and racialized space appropriated from biologist Oscar Peschel’s response to Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection. In complementing Ovaherero and Nama efforts for reparations, this dissertation embraces an altercentric historiography — a genealogical materialism guided by ubuntu philosophy — and approach to biological science that narrativizes Germany’s first genocide as a material expression of the colonial biomedical logics that animated the the colonial project and endure in the present.I am using three case studies that tether contemporary scientific and archival practice to colonial-era biomedical harms. First, the collection and ongoing incarceration of Ovaherero and Nama skulls and other skeletal remains in German and American and other archival collections is a feature of a broader regime of race-making and property rights. The the continued capture of these remains has been described by Ovaherero and Nama community members as a continuation of genocide through the linking of expropriative colonial actions to the “post”-colonial present. Secondly, an analysis of Eugen Fischer’s transnational “bastard studies” allows for an examination of the genocide continuity thesis. It connects the imperial German study of mixedness in southern Africa to eugenic study in Weimar and then Nazi Germany via the desire to manage perceived impurities to whiteness resulting from race-mixing. This illustration of continuity reveals how desires for racial management in each location yielded both consistent and differential racial structures and fates for the mixed-race communities in question. Finally, the deep interest in the sequencing and tracing of San genomes is inextricably linked to anthropological constructions of “hunter-gatherers” as ancient and primitive, and the Eurocentric compulsion to enclose and define and hierarchize human life with the creation of a “human” that always precludes African indigeneity. The always already racialized genomics projects and nation-state assertions of genomic sovereignty are occurring simultaneously to San communities being dispossessed of their land and turned into an underclass in the nation-states into which they are being forcibly assimilated

Looting the archive: German genocide and incarcerated skulls

Since African nation-states began to gain their independence in the mid-twentieth century, they have fought for the repatriation of cultural artifacts and human remains as an integral part of continental processes of decolonization. Using the concept of the “afterlife of genocide” as a method for understanding transformed but still ongoing processes of genocidal dispossession, this paper engages the relationship between the organizing colonial logics of the 1904-1908 German genocide of Ovaherero and Nama people in South West Africa and the continued presence of Ovaherero and Nama skulls in Euroamerican museum institutions

“We are Fighting Nazis”: Genocidal Fashionings of Gaza(ns) After 7 October

Scholarly responses to the ongoing war have been mired in competing historical and socio-legal interpretations of the very concept of genocide, and these fundamental disagreements are partially owed to deep divisions within the field of Genocide Studies itself. On one hand, some claim that Hamas’ massacres and hostage-taking of Israeli civilians constitute genocidal acts in themselves: violences that are inextricably linked to a global rise in antisemitism and the ongoing denial of both Jewish people’s and the state of Israel’s right to existence. While rightfully expressing horror at the brutality of Hamas’ attack, others still situate the enduring armed struggle within an ongoing process of settler colonial violence that has structured Palestinian life since the massacres and mass expulsions of 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Even as Genocide Studies is meant to exist as a transdisciplinary field accounting for a global scope of genocidal atrocities, its disciplinary core remains the Holocaust as an exemplar sine qua non of genocide following relatively conservative interpretations of Raphael Lemkin’s conception and its translation into the United Nations Genocide Convention. These divergent epistemic structures–a divergence in which orthodox interpretations of genocide proceeding from the exceptionality of Nazi crimes are challenged by more troubled considerations of genocide within histories of colonial race-making and more multidirectional memory politics–represent an overdue disciplinary engagement of the so-called “Palestine Question.” This, in turn, bears implications for the overwhelming limitations of international law in questions of genocide and our overreliance on its narrow interpretive power