1,720,963 research outputs found
An Analysis of the Legitimacy of the BRICS in the International System
Get PDFDissertation (MA International Relations)--University of Pretoria, 2019.The emergence of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) as a coalition acting within the global governance architecture has been met with skepticism and guarded enthusiasm. After ten years in existence, the BRICS countries have continued to consolidate relations among themselves, expand their cooperation and expand its engagement with the international community. The BRICS has been establishing its legitimacy as a relevant actor and carving out a space to act out its corporate identity. I argue that the BRICS has been engaged in a non-linear and negotiated process to establish its legitimacy. I do this by highlighting the deliberate acts undertaken to carve out an identity and to elicit agreement on the acceptable range of its conduct in global affairs. The study brings together literature on the BRICS with literature on legitimacy to shed light on the application and significance of issues of legitimacy in international relations.Political SciencesMA International RelationsUnrestricte
The failure of Pan-Africanism : a critical analysis of the AU's collective withdrawal strategy
Get PDFMini Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2018.African states helped to create the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002. As a result of the violence that unfolded on the continent in the 1980s and 1990s, African states realized the need for an international judicial institution responsible for prosecuting perpetrators of gross human rights violations. They were instrumental in garnering support for the ICC. However, what began as a cooperative relationship between the African Union (AU) and the ICC has become strained. This became evident when some African states presented a collective withdrawal strategy at the AU Summit in January 2017. This strategy called for African states to unify in their rejection of a neo-imperial court, calling for states to subsequently withdraw from the ICC. However, it appears that African states are not unanimous in their rejection of the judicial institution, taking opposing positions on the issue of withdrawal.
This research explores the diverging African positions on withdrawal as a weakness of Pan-African unity. The lack of a common position concerning whether African states should remain or withdraw from the ICC is indicative of a drawback of African solidarity. This apparent lack of a common African position is detrimental to the AU in realizing an African unity. Through the use of a narrative and descriptive literature review, the study aims to trace how the narrative of withdrawal arose by outlining the positions of influential AU member states namely Burundi, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa. This method will take into account key events which have distorted Africa’s relationship with the ICC and altered the relationship amongst AU member states. Lastly, the disgruntlement of some African states with the ICC has augmented the AU’s creation of regional judicial institutions. This study concludes that the Criminal Chamber in the African Court of Justice and Human Rights is currently not a Pan-African alternative to the ICC.Political SciencesMAUnrestricte
The Public Intellectualism of Phyllis Ntantala
Get PDFDissertation (MA (Political Science))--University of Pretoria, 2022.South African scholars have not substantively engaged with how they have conceptualized who the public intellectual is and where intellectual activity occurs. The dominance of men in the scholarship is attributed to scholars defining public intellectuals according to the roles and functions they supposedly perform. Consequently, intellectual activity has been confined to the public sphere to be performed by a male figure. This has encouraged the under-exploration of how African/Black women have pursued and enacted public intellectualism. In South Africa, Black women have been erased from genealogical accounts of public intellectualism. Erasure has occurred despite their visibility in the fight against colonialism and apartheid. Black women are public intellectuals, and this is a matter of historical fact and necessity. The study adopts Phyllis Ntantala as its referential subject. Ntantala's public intellectualism is characterized by fluidity between the public and private spheres. She utilized what many regard as private issues to inform her work in the public sphere. Issues confined to the private sphere became her entryway into the public sphere. The ways Ntantala pursued and enacted public intellectualism urges us to reconsider how we might re-envision the public intellectual and what counts as intellectual activity.Andrew Mello FoundationPolitical SciencesMA (Political Science)Unrestricte
An investigation of Gender Mainstreaming in Disarmament, Demobolisation, and Reintegration (DDR) Programmes : the case of the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo
Get PDFMini Dissertation (MSS)--University of Pretoria, 2017.Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes aim to contribute to sustainable peace of a country after a violent conflict. In the early 1990s, DDR programmes were predominantly aimed at male combatants who were members of armed forces. Women in armed movements were generally viewed as non-combatants serving the needs of their male counterparts. Their agency – the ability to make choices and to transform these choices into desirable outcomes – was overlooked. In 1997, the United Nations (UN) Economic and Social Council recognised that women, like men, should participate in peace processes as equal partners and beneficiaries. This recognition paved the way for gender mainstreaming within UN peace operations, which meant that all planned actions, legislations, policies, and programmes should be assessed for their implications for men and women. The commitment to gender mainstreaming within the UN was reaffirmed with the adoption of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) in October 2000. The aim of this research is to investigate gender mainstreaming in official regional and national DDR programmes since the adoption of UNSCR 1325, focusing on the case of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This research identified that gender mainstreaming has been incorporated, to an extent, within DDR programmes in the DRC. Women, however, are still viewed as passive victims by international and national agencies. Women’s agency within DDR programmes is primarily denied. When comparing the overall findings of the investigation and the objectives of UNSCR 1325, one can agree that gendered initiatives and attempts within the DRC have not ensured effective peace support operations, have not focused on gender equality, have not dealt with men and women in the same manner, and women were primary not given opportunities to play an equal part in economic, political, or social development within the DRC as active agents. The investigation of gender mainstreaming within the DRC has furthermore provided knowledge in that, although governments commit to UNSCR 1325, without political will, gender mainstreaming will not be enforced.Political SciencesMSSUnrestricte
Economic Freedom Fighters' debuti n the municipal elections
Get PDFThe Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has
transformed the South African political
landscape since it was established in 2013.
In the 2016 municipal election, the EFF won
8.2 percent of the national vote making it
the third biggest party after the ANC and
the Democratic Alliance (DA). It did not take
over any municipalities, but it performed
well enough to be the kingmaker in 13
hung councils, including three metros. This
paper discusses the EFF's electoral campaign
and performance in the 2016 local general
election (LGE). It asks whether the EFF has
transcended the personality politics of its
leader to attract its desired constituency on a
broad scale. Has the party managed to move
beyond a politics of spectacle to develop the
content of its political value proposition?
Given the organisational challenges it faces, what are its prospects of being a serious
contender for national government in 2019?http://www.saapam.co.za/joba.htmlam2017Economic
The quest for equitable multilateralism : mapping South African interests in reforming the global order
No full textDr Sithembile Mbete, University of Pretori
Critical analysis of South Africa's Human Rights diplomacy in the United Nations Security Council 2007-2008
Get PDFMini Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2017.At the dawn of democracy, South Africa emerged as a human rights champion across the globe. The Nelson Mandela presidency is often referred to as a human rights crusade era. South Africa signing and ratifying international human rights instruments. Even during this human rights crusade era, South Africa experienced hiccups in terms of its human rights position. However, criticism reached a peak during South Africa’s first term of 2007-2008 in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) under Mbeki presidency. The country’s decisions to block adoption of two draft Resolutions to sanction Zimbabwe and Myanmar became central cases used to question the country’s commitment to human rights initially articulated by Nelson Mandela. It is argued that South Africa failed to uphold its constitutional principles and the obligation to protect human rights globally. This study seeks to engage the literature critically to argue that South Africa’s human rights status cannot be sufficiently measured through the conduct of the country in the UNSC, an organ characterised by misuse of the human rights concept and abuse of power by three permanent members including United State, United Kingdom and France. The study defends an argument that South Africa has not neglected human rights, However, was a victim of the institutional imbalance of the UNSC, which created the incentive for South Africa to pursue conditional cooperation. Although Article 62 of the UN Charter explicitly allocates competency in human rights questions to United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). This study is built on a conceptual framework and uses UNSC as the unit of analysis because the organ shares an implicit responsibility for the protection of human rights as human rights issues related to international peace and security.Political SciencesMAUnrestricte
The 'Middle Power' Debate Revisited : South Africa in the United Nations Security Council, 2007-2008 and 2011-2012
Get PDFThesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2018.South Africa’s post-1994 leadership in multilateral forums and its efforts to be a bridge-builder and norm-entrepreneur in the international arena, have earned it the label of ‘middle power’. The label itself is contentious, as there is no commonly accepted definition of middle powers and there is disagreement about whether the label applies to South Africa. This study contributes to the discourse on a new normative ‘middle’ in the realm of structural power, by using the case of South Africa’s two terms as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (2007 - 2008 and 2011 - 2012). The Council represents the most powerful forum of global structural power, and therefore offers a useful and compact arena in which to analyse South Africa’s participation from a middle power perspective. The original contribution of the study is, on the one hand, its approach from a hitherto under-researched global South perspective, and on the other hand its purposeful analytical nexus between theory and practice in international relations. In doing so, the refinement and development of an important theoretical construct – the ‘middle power’ idea as related to the distinct diplomacy of certain emerging powers – is supported by a critical understanding of an actual case of state (South Africa’s) behaviour in the contemporary realm of structural power.Political SciencesDPhilUnrestricte
Performing minority populism : the Solidariteit Beweging in post-apartheid South Africa
Get PDFDissertation (MA (Political Science))--University of Pretoria, 2022.This dissertation advances a qualitative single-case study of minority populism, selecting the SB as its case, and develops and operationalises a post-Laclauian theoretical framework to address two research questions: How does the SB perform populism? and What type of populism does the SB express? The main purpose of the dissertation is to determine how minority populism emerges out of the actions and utterances of SB leaders as they ‘do’ or perform populism and to then interpretively discuss and thickly describe the sort of populism they espouse in comparative terminology from existing populism studies literature.Political SciencesMA (Political Science)Unrestricte
Women in Peace Operations : Female Representation within MINUSTAH’s Uniformed Personnel
Get PDFMini Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2020.The peacekeeping mechanism is arguably the most important tool the United Nations can resort to when dealing with threats to international peace and security. Since the end of the Cold War, a number of Security Council resolutions and peacekeeping policies have acknowledged the importance of increasing the number of female peacekeepers in the uniformed components of UN missions in order to adapt to the changing nature of violent conflicts and to address new security threats. This study focuses on the integration of women in peace operations and their impact on both the mission and the host population by exploring the case of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). MINUSTAH was seen by Haitians as a return to international occupation, which was exacerbated by the many cases recorded of sexual violence by peacekeepers against the host population. The MINUSTAH case tests the argument that women peacekeepers improve a UN mission’s operational effectiveness because of their assumed inherent ability to connect with the host community and tame the violent behaviour of their male counterparts. This study argues that without addressing issues of men and violent masculinities in military institutions, providing female peacekeepers with proper pre-deployment training, and deploying more women in front-line positions, simply raising the number of women deployed in the field is insufficient to really improve the operational effectiveness of UN missions.
Keywords: UN peacekeeping, gender mainstreaming, women peacekeepers, UNSCR 1325, MINUSTAH, HaitiPolitical SciencesMAUnrestricte
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