Suchergebnisse

This book reflects on the life and politics of Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) and his efforts to broker peace and reconciliation in a deeply divided country. Through examples from apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, it explores conflict and methods for realising peace, social justice, and democracy. The book looks at the festering of animosity and racial bitterness between the white Afrikaner community and the black community during years of racial violence, injustices, and authoritarianism in South Africa. In the most violent phase of the country's history, Mandela offered to both communities peaceful means to ensure equality, justice, and inclusivity. The author highlights the extraordinary challenges which Mandela faced in mobilising consent and persuading both the black and the Afrikaner community to acquiesce to a peaceful transfer of power. The volume further details the socio-political contexts and negotiations which resulted in the swift transfer of power, Mandela's insistence on crafting inclusive systems of nationhood, his multi-cultural cabinet, and the institutionalisation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address challenges facing the two communities in the post-conflict period. An accessible introduction to one of the greatest leaders in contemporary history, this book will be essential reading for scholars and researchers of peace and conflict studies, social exclusion and discrimination, critical race theory, human rights, politics, decolonisation and post-colonial studies, sociology, and history.

Foreword by m. hamid ansari -- Preface -- Pluralism and secularism -- The political context: communalism -- Secularism: the debate -- Colonialism, nationalism and the making of religious identity -- The evolution of minority rights and secularism in india -- Equality and the rights of minorities -- The principle of tolerance -- Wrapping up -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the author.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Democracy and political violence can hardly be considered conceptual siblings, at least at first sight. Democracy allows people to route their aspirations, demands, and expectations of the state through peaceful methods; violence works outside these prescribed and institutionalized channels in public spaces, in the streets, in the forests and in inhospitable terrains. But can committed democrats afford to ignore the fact that violence has become a routine way of doing politics in countries such as India? By exploring the concept of political violence from the perspective of critical political theory, Neera Chandhoke investigates its nature, justification and contradictions. She uses the case study of Maoist revolutionaries in India to globalize and relocate the debate alongside questions of social injustice, exploitation, oppression and imperfect democracies. As such, this is an important and much-needed contribution to the dialogue surrounding revolutionary violence.

Approaching contested secession and the more Western concept of consensual secession from a political theory perspective, this book focuses on the Kashmir issue as a form of contested secession and examines whether the Kashmiri people have a 'right' to secede

Zoya Hasan, Agitation to Legislation: Negotiating Equity and Justice in India. New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2018, 178 pp., ₹675, ISBN: 9780199482177 (Hardcover).

AbstractOver the last two decades, academics (based largely in the west) and activists have invested a great deal of energy in global poverty. This article asks: why should people not be poor? Surprisingly, this question elicits a number of answers. The pragmatically inclined can suggest that the existence of a large number of poor people poses a direct threat to the social and political order. Humanitarians are likely to argue that poverty breeds unfortunate consequences, which demoralises human beings, and violates our best‐held convictions that no one should be compelled to live below the threshold of decency. The response of normative theorists might be that society is complicit in the creation and recreation of poverty. Then society is obliged to remedy the wrongs that it has visited upon the heads of the poor. This constitutes a basic code of remedial justice. These responses can form the axis of separate and distinct arguments on the reasons why people should not be poor. In this article, I argue that there is more to the question.