Theoria

This article proposes a retheorisation of Rawlsian civil disobedience through examining the burdens we expect people to bear when they practice civil disobedience, focussing specifically on marginalised groups. First, I consider public concerns over civil disobedience, to elicit the idea of an ‘authentic civil disobedience’. I then assess the claim that civil disobedience occurs within a ‘nearly just’ society in order to recognise the more complex position of marginalised civil disobedients. This allows me to frame any criteria we theorise for civil disobedience as a wicked problem. Next, I examine one particular criterion dominant within the literature: that to be interpreted as civil disobedience, disobedients must show a willingness to suffer the legal consequences – and so, must not act anonymously. I claim that this asks too much of civil disobedients in a marginalised context and conclude civil disobedience theory needs retheorising to consider when and why anonymity is acceptable.

This article focuses on efforts by indigenous activists to oppose a mega-development in the middle of the Two Rivers Urban Park (TRUP) at the River Club site in Observatory, Cape Town. In the article we argue that, even though the mega-development ultimately went ahead, intense contestation surrounding Khoi cultural heritage contributed towards opening up the ‘black box’ of urban development in Cape Town, as well as pressuring the developers to accommodate some of the demands of indigenous activists and environmentalists. We also examine why and on what terms it was even possible for a small group of indigenous activists to temporarily halt a mega-development driven by powerful actors, including Amazon, the City of Cape Town and private developers. Drawing inspiration from Bruno Latour's notion of the black box, we show how these anti-development activists were able to interrupt the construction process and create the conditions for opening up to public and legal scrutiny opaque urban development processes.

The coronavirus pandemic made the biopolitics of infection control the core object of states around the world. Globally, states governed spheres usually free of state control, implementing various restrictions, closing down society in the process. This is possible due to the state's capacities to act through and over society, grounded in the state's powers. I argue that while the pandemic has led to useful and interesting state-centric Foucauldian literature on the politics of COVID-19, this literature has not fully taken the theoretical lessons of the pandemic into account. Explicating these lessons, I discuss how the pandemic invites us to reconsider the Foucauldian approach to the state. The purpose of this article is to combine the Foucauldian theory of power with a Weberian state theory based on Michael Mann's work on the state and the sources of power, so to lay the foundations for a Weberian-Foucauldian theory of the state.

In Apartheid South Africa, eugenic notions formed an underlying justification for the superiority of the white race over Africans, through the works of international eugenicists like Galton and Pearson, and locally through prominent South African eugenicist H. B. Fantham. These ideas are expressed and elaborated upon in Emevwo Biakalo's essay ‘Categories of Cross-Cultural Cognition and the African Condition’. His work serves particularly to highlight that the mind and cognitive processes of Africans were considered very different from their white counterparts, and thus they would require different approaches to education. I demonstrate here how these views served as part of the underlying justification for Apartheid in South Africa, particularly in Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd's insistence on creating separate and distinct educational systems for different races. This eugenic legacy is still visible in South Africa's radically unequal education system to this day.

Abraham Olivier, M. John Lamola and Justin Sands, Eds., Phenomenology in an African Context: Contributions and Challenges, 2023. State University of New York Press, 353pp. ISBN: 9781438494876 (hbk)

Elias Opongo and Tim Murithi, Eds., Elections, Violence and Transitional Justice in Africa Elections, Violence and Transitional Justice in Africa, 2022. Routledge, 202 pp. ISBN: 9780367655280 (hbk)