An Israeli Soldier's Story - Eran Efrati

Gaza conflict: Lives that matter

Gabeba Baderoon and Nadia Davids, Letter to the Editor, Mail & Guardian

The reality of war is bitter.  A Vietnamese writer once confided that, for her, nighttime and its peaceful silence was a time of visceral fear because when she was a child, the silence of night was when the bombs would fall. Now, silence took her back to the moment before the explosions and so she could not rest. This is how the fear and destruction – the reality – of war enters our bodies immediately and forever.

Yet it seems we weigh realities differently.

EFF and the return of the warrior citizen

by Siphokazi Magadla, Thought Leader

The advent of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has gained much attention as the first clear reconfiguration of youth politics in post-apartheid South Africa. Much has been discussed about the policies proposed by “Commander-in-Chief” Julius Malema and his commissars, especially those regarding nationalisation and the appropriation of land. While there has been some discussion about the significance of the red beret, there has been little discussion about the significance of the military nature of the language used by the EFF. This language is important in the South African context because it demonstrates the extent to which “peace” in South Africa is evidently militarised peace.

Legacies of Apartheid Wars Conference, Rhodes University, 4-6 July 2013

Call for Abstracts

"Addressing, Archiving and Accounting for Legacies of the Apartheid Wars in

Southern Africa"

Twenty years since the establishment of democracy in South Africa, the people, land and politics of Southern Africa continue to be imprinted and
influenced by the legacies of the wars fuelled by the apartheid era. The aim
of this cross-disciplinary conference is to invite diverse views and
perspectives on addressing the legacies of these wars. Scholars and
activists are invited to present papers and engage in conversations about
their work, their contexts and their insights.

The Assault on Democracy in Haiti: Jeb Sprague interviewed by David Zlutnick

Hosting the World

by Chris McMichael, 2012

Using the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as a case study, this paper will explore how security measures for sports mega-events have been steadily militarized with policing operations comparable to war planning. It will be argued that this is representative of the ‘new military urbanism’ in which everyday urban life is rendered as a site of ubiquitous risk leading to the increased diffusion of military tactics and doctrines in policing and policy.

While the interpenetration between urbanism and militarism has often been studied

against the context of the War on Terror, the paper will argue that in the case of South Africa this has primarily been accelerated by a pervasive social fear of violent crime, which has resulted in the securitization of cities, the remilitarization of policing and the intensification of a historical legacy of socio-spatial inequalities. The South African government used the World Cup to ‘rebrand’ the country’s violent international image, while promising that security measures would leave a legacy of safer cities for ordinary South Africans. However, using military urbanism as a conceptual backdrop, the case studies presented in the second part of the paper argue that policing measures were primarily cosmetic and designed to allay the fears of foreign tourists and the national middle class. In practice, security measures pivoted around the enforcement of social control and urban marginalization while serving as a training ground for an increasingly repressive state security apparatus. The paper will conclude with a discussion of how the global crossover between militarism and urbanism threatens to stimulate and rehabilitate deeply entrenched authoritarian tendencies in South Africa.

The South African Police Service and the Public Order War

by Chris McMichael, Think Africa Press

Has the remilitarisation of the police led to an attitude of seeing public order maintenance as a form of warfare?

In early 2010, the South African Police Service (SAPS) began a formal process of remilitarisation. At the time this was depicted as a necessary project of reasserting ‘command and control’ and ‘discipline’ within the service to better enable the police to fight violent criminals.

However, in the last two years the SAPS has become more associated with a war on the wider public. The Independent Police Investigations Directorate has seen a substantial increase of deaths in police custody and reports of abuse and torture by officers. Last year, the killing of protester Andries Tatane brought national attention to the increased lethality of police crowd control tactics. In the province of KwaZulu-Natal this year alone, there has already been the trial of the Cato Manor Organised Crime Unit for extrajudicial killings and the shooting of unarmed demonstrators in Umlazi.

Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti

by Jeb Sprague, Monthly Review Press

In this path-breaking book, Jeb Sprague investigates the dangerous world of right-wing paramilitarism in Haiti and its role in undermining the democratic aspirations of the Haitian people. Sprague focuses on the period beginning in 1990 with the rise of Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the right-wing movements that succeeded in driving him from power.

Punishing Youth

by Henry Giroux, CounterPunch, 11 August 2012

There is by now an overwhelming catalogue of evidence revealing the depth and breadth of the state sponsored assault being waged against young people across the globe, and especially in the United States. What is no longer a hidden order of politics is that American  society is at war with its children, and that the use of such violence against young people is a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis.  Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a nation that fails to protect its youth, the violence used against American youth speaks to nothing less than a perverse death-wish, especially in light of the fact that As Alain Badiou argues, we live in an era in which there is zero tolerance for poor minority youth and youthful protesters and “infinite tolerance for the crimes of bankers and government embezzlers which affect the lives of millions.” 

The revolution and the emancipation of women

by Amber Murrey, Pambazuka

I would like to situate my ideas within the geo-political context of the popular uprisings that continue to take place around the world as people organise against neoliberal policies of advanced capitalism and their resultant gross inequalities in wealth, health and education. Accompanying the intensifying neoliberal crises - manifested through the financial crisis, food security crisis, and struggles over land reform and landed property - is an ever expanding militarisation. The US military now has more bases and more personnel stations in more countries than ever in its history. The US Africa Command is one component of the US military’s current phase of expansion, including millions of dollars of military equipment, arms and training in African nations. 

The shock-and-awe of mega sports events

Christopher McMichael, Open Democracy

The overlap between the security measures for major sporting events and contemporary war zones are a striking and increasingly globalised phenomenon. Lest we forget that the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup are ostensibly about sport and not security, London 2012 chairman Lord Coe was recently moved to offer his assurance that the British capital will not be a “siege city” come August. However the presence of warships, surface to air missiles, thousands of military personal and pre-emptive bans on protest suggests otherwise.

Arundhati Roy: Revolts and Rebellions

Namibia: Endemic Violence in Postcolonial Nation

by Shaun R. Whittaker, The Nigerian Daily

Frantz Fanon participated actively in the anti-colonial struggles in northern Africa, which is currently undergoing an astonishing phase of social change. It was probably inevitable that Fanon’s magnum opus about colonialism, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, would start off with a discourse about violence.