When Law Is Not Justice: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak interviewed by Brad Evans

The New York Times

Brad Evans: Throughout your work, you have written about the conditions faced by the globally disadvantaged, notably in places such as India, China and Africa. How might we use philosophy to better understand the various types of violence that erupt as a result of the plight of the marginalized in the world today?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: While violence is not beyond naming and diagnosis, it does raise many challenging questions all the same. I am a pacifist. I truly believe in the power of nonviolence. But we cannot categorically deny a people the right to resist violence, even, under certain conditions, with violence. Sometimes situations become so intolerable that moral certainties are no longer meaningful. There is a difference here between condoning such a response and trying to understand why the recourse to violence becomes inevitable.

Riot Police in Parliament

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

When the ANC raised Jacob Zuma above the rule of law and the scrutiny of parliament they repeated, on live television, an aspect of the logic with which the subaltern classes are routinely governed. The democratic rights that have been enjoyed by the middle classes over the last twenty years are frequently denied to people who inhabit zones, like the former Bantustan or the urban shack settlement, where different rules apply.

Moseneke Keynote Address at the 20 Years of Democracy Conference 12 - 13 November 2014 by TigersEye99

'In Search of Equality' & 'Marriage, Land & Custom'

Raymond Suttner on State Repression and Illegality in Durban

Interview with Premesh Lalu on Nelson Mandela

World Bulletin / Ibrahim Tigli and Jalal Rayi - Cape Town

Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first black president who steered his nation out of apartheid, passed away on December 6 at the age of 95.

Premesh Lalu, who studies social history and the apartheid regime, has replied to the questions of World Bulletin about Nelson Mandela and South Africa's past and future.

Lalu is the director of the Centre for Humanities Research (University of the Western Cape) and chair of the Handspring Trust.

The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela in Admiration

Jacques Derrida - Pour Nelson Mandela by Che Brandes-Tuka

The truth about rights in South Africa

By Iqbal Suleman, Thought Leader

Rights ranging from access to land to access to justice are entrenched in our Constitution. These rights are presumed to be available and readily accessible to everyone. The Constitution tells us that we all have equal rights but the reality shows us otherwise. In a free market economy, nothing is really free. From access to housing, healthcare, education and justice. It all has a price. If you cannot afford it, you cannot access it. What do you mean justice is inaccessible and market driven, you hear neo-liberals cry. There are human-rights NGOs, legal aid, university law clinics and pro bono attorneys. It remains unsure, though, how many people are able access these mainly urban-centred, rights-based organisations and what capacity these organisations have.

'Shock and awe tactics' used on shack dwellers

by Jared Sacks, Mail & Guardian

On April 27, while political parties were spending fortunes to celebrate freedom, the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo commemorated – or "mourned" – what it called UnFreedom Day in Sweet Home, the shack settlement in Philippi on the Cape Flats.

On the same day, a group of shack dwellers from the Philippi East area increased their occupation of a piece of land just off Symphony Way, between Stock and Govan Mbeki roads. But a day later, the City of Cape Town decided to show them exactly how unfree they still are.

City of Cape Town makes up law to justify eviction of the poor

by Jared Sacks, Daily Maverick

The City of Cape Town has been caught red-handed using a fraudulent legal pretext to justify the eviction of shack dwellers who had occupied a vacant piece of City-owned land, by citing a non-existent law they claim is called the “Protection of the Possession of Property Act”. After speaking with legal experts in the field of property and evictions, I was told that not only was the eviction of the 'Marikana' shack dwellers in Cape Town’s Philippi East illegal according to the PIE Act, but city officials had also lied about the living conditions of the shack dwellers.

George Bizos: Law, Justice & Morality in South Africa: The Past & the Present

(Talk given to the School of Practical Philosophy During Plato Week - 22 April 2013)

Professors, academics, philosophers, students and interested guests:

1.  It is my honour to have been asked to speak at Plato Week in South Africa by the School of Practical Philosophy. I would like to thank Stephen Meintjies and David Horan for making this week possible. For those of you who may not know me, I am of Greek origin and accordingly it has brought me endless joy to conduct some of my research in preparation for this speech.

Marikana: The politics of law and order in post-apartheid South Africa

Suren Pillay

By Suren Pillay, Al Jazeera

With their pangas and machetes mixed with ethnic regalia, the striking mine workers at Marikana have become spectacularised. It is a stark reminder that the mine worker, a modern subject of capitalism, in these parts of the world is also the product of a colonial encounter. 

Many of us are trying to make sense of the massacre at Marikana through the obvious dire economic conditions, wage rates and inequality that these workers face. We must however also try to make sense of it through the lineages of law, order and the new configurations of politics emerging in post-apartheid South Africa. 

Hlonipha Mokoena: 'Zuluness on trial'

Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid

By Nicholas Blomley, 2003

Physical violence, whether realized or implied, is important to the legitimation, foundation, and operation of a Western property regime. Certain spatializations -notably those of the frontier, the survey, and the grid - play a practical and ideological role at all these moments. Both property and space, I argue, are reproduced through various enactments.While those enactments can be symbolic, they must also be acknowledged as practical, material, and corporeal.

Reading Fanon in Palestine/Israel

by Nasser Rego, Jadaliyya

The fiftieth anniversary of the death of revolutionary, writer and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon was commemorated this past December. In late February, the not-so-revolutionary judge Asher Grunis was elected President of the Israeli Supreme Court.

The fanfare that accompanied Grunis’ inauguration was an opportunity to extol Israeli democracy by playing out the ritualized Supreme Court induction ceremony. Yet, there was a disquieting stink about the celebration. Mum among the lot of Hatikva-singing judges was Justice Salim Jubran, the Arab. His refusal to join the chorus likely stemmed from not identifying with the lyrics, "as long as in the heart, within, a Jewish soul still yearns..." His silence, however, prompted loud condemnation from the public and Israeli Knesset members, leading some to propose legislation that would impeach Jubran and effectively bar Arabs from serving on the bench.

We Want the Full Loaf (not just a child support grant)

Presentation at the Development Action Group Workshop

Cape Town, 18 November 2009

by Mnikelo Ndabankulu, Abahlali baseMjondolo

We Want the Full Loaf (not just a child support grant)

The Slums Act

The Slums Act first came to our ears as a Bill in 2006. The information about this Bill came to us indirectly through our sources.

It was clear that we needed to discuss this Bill as Abahlali. M'du Hlongwa and I both went to the Government Communications to ask a copy. We had two copies and we shared these copies and we analysed the Bill. We had a number of meetings where we read the Bill together going one line by one line.

Mr. Velile Mafani Will Throw Three Stones Through the Window of the High Court in Grahamstown Tomorrow

5 January 2012

Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

Our movement has been approached by Mr. Velile Ben Mafani. He informed us that tomorrow he will throw three stones, one white, one black, and one red, through the window of the High Court in Grahamstown. He will tie a letter stating his demands around the stones.

‘From shack to the Constitutional Court’: The litigious disruption of governing global cities

by Anna Selmeczi, Utrecht Law Review, April 2011

On October 14th 2009, the South African Constitutional Court judged unconstitutional and so invalidated the so-called ‘Slums Act’; a provincial legislation of KwaZulu-Natal that was also supposed to be the blueprint for other provinces’ policies of eradicating informal settlements. The decision signalled a major victory for the first applicant Abahlali baseMjondolo, the country’s largest shack dwellers’ movement that has been struggling for a dignified life in the cities since 2005. Beyond its relevance for the debates surrounding the justiciability of social and economic rights so famously included in the South African Constitution, when viewed from the perspective of the shack dwellers’ mobilization, the case appears to manifest contemporary technologies of power; the various practices that shape urban spaces and determine what kind of lives should inhabit them. Indeed, in rationalizing the municipal effort to eliminate shack settlements from urban centres with sanitary concerns and justifying evictions with the will to improve poor people’s living conditions, the ‘Slums Act’ reflects biopolitics in action.