Columbia International Affairs Online

CIAO DATE: 10/07

Theoria

Vol. 51, No. 3, Issue 105 (December 2004)

Articles

• Forget Forgiveness: On the Benefits of Sympathy for Political Reconciliation
  Nir Eisikovits

  The work of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has generated a great deal of interest in the role of forgiveness in politics. More specifically, it has raised the question of whether forgiveness should be a constitutive part of reconciliation processes between groups. In this paper, I argue that it should not, and that it might be both more useful and more realistic to consider something like Adam Smith's notion of 'sympathy' instead. The first part examines the arguments for and against policies promoting political forgiveness. The second part suggests sympathy as an alternative. The third part considers and rejects some objections to the employment of sympathy in this context.

• The Ant and the Grasshopper: Rationalising Exclusion and Inequality in the Post-apartheid City
  Richard Ballard

  This paper is an inductive organisation of material collected for research on white perceptions of urban change (Ballard 2002). The core of the material is 59 interviews conducted in Durban in 1996 and 1997, supplemented by a focus group in 2003 and newspaper articles stretching from 1990 to the present. The interviews were conducted in the middle-class, predominantly English, suburb of the Berea in Durban, and further work would be required to ascertain their general applicability. Furthermore, they reflect sentiments in the post-transitional years and the same exercise conducted now may yield a different mix of views. While this aterial would certainly not be suitable for generalising as 'white views', the intention here is to investigate particular discursive themes in and of themselves, which are important to understand in relation to perceptions of social justice in the decade since democracy. Rather than attempting to capture white views in general, the intention is to capture particular logics regardless of their prevalence.

• Symbolic Representations of the Post-apartheid University
  Christine Winberg

  The 21 new universities and the academic practitioners located within them will take up the challenges and respond to higher education policy differentially. There will be many different stories to tell. New epistemologies of excellence will evolve to judge the quality and legitimacy of such responses. New assessments of excellence need not be founded upon traditional academic or scientific criteria; but they are not in place, and are yet to be achieved. Thus claims about what a university is and whose interests it serves are premature. There is no single university in South Africa today (nor was there in the past). One might think about 'the university' as a rich and always-in-motion debate about what universities are, should be, and can become.

• The Justice of Crime Prevention: The Case of South Africa
  Thaddeus Metz

  In this article, I critically evaluate the new South African state's approach to crime prevention in light of the principle of respect of persons, the moral principle that most theorists take to underwrite constitutional democracy. I show that the most common explanations of why justice requires the state to fight crime are unconvincing, to provide a more promising respect-based ground of this requirement, and to spell out how this requirement could be met. I argue that the state has failed to meet its requirement to fight crime, that it could have met it, and that it should have met it. One thing I have not done here is provide an explanation of why the state has not met its requirement. That is an interesting question for social scientists, and answering it might help activists who seek to change state policies. However, doing so is not pertinent to establish-ing my normative thesis that the state has failed to act in a way consistent with the dignity of citizens for having failed to help them by enacting programmes that would have been at least likely to reduce serious crime in morally permissible ways.

• Righting the Wrongs of Apartheid Justice for Victims and Unjust Profiteers
  Kevin Hopkins & Christopher Roederer

  In trying to come to grips with what is involved in righting the wrongs of apartheid, we begin by pointing out unique challenges posed by societies in transition. It is our position that the pursuit of justice is not the same in transitional contexts as it is in stable democracies. As we shall see, the transitional domain throws up several non-standard obstacles in the way of fulfilling the imperatives of justice. After this introduction to justice in transitions we will look more closely at the relationship between justice and law in the context of political transformation generally, and the specific relationship between justice and international human rights law in this transformative process. Thereafter we will address the pursuit of justice in respect of both apartheid's perpetrators as well as its victims-the discussion will, however, be limited to the liability of those who fall outside the scope of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's (TRC) mandate. In that regard, we will deal with violations of rights not specifically covered by the TRC: odious apartheid debt owed to international legal entities; other debt incurred by the apartheid state to private money-lending institutions; the violation of international labour standards in the apartheid state; and the unjust enrichment of foreign corporations at the expense of black South Africans.

• Reviews

  David Marquand, Decline of the Public: The Hollowing-out of Citizenship
  Reviewed by Steven Michel
  Jonathan Franzen, How To Be Alone
  Reviewed by Derek Hook

• Beyond Party Politics: Unexpected Democracy-deepening Consequences of One-party Dominance in South Africa
  Heidi Leigh Matisonn

  The article begins with an examination of the options available to citizens to ensure and promote responsive government in light of the institutional framework and the political dynamics of contemporary South Africa. The following three sections examine some critical issues in contemporary South Africa- HIV/Aids, crime, and welfare reform-focusing on citizens' responses to these issues in an attempt to decide the extent to which one-party dominance is democracy erosive, democracy neutral, or democracy deepening in the South African context. The theoretical significance of these three issues is that they are examples (although obviously not the only examples) of different kinds of alternative mechanisms of decision-making which also relate to and encompass the three criteria of democracy used in this article.