Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- National security surveillance and anti-capitalism: A theoretical discussion -- Doing security differently? National security surveillance in southern Africa. -- Lawful interception as imperialism -- Mass surveillance and national security imperialism -- The global trade in spyware -- Police as spies: Securitization of protests and intelligence-led policing -- Fortress South Africa: Securitizing identity and border management -- Conclusion

In spite of Edward Snowden's disclosures about government abuses of dragnet communication surveillance, the surveillance industry continues to expand around the world. Many people have become resigned to a world where they cannot have a reasonable expectation of privacy. In this open access book, the author looks at what can be done to rein in these powers and restructure how they are used beyond the limited and often ineffective reforms that have been attempted. Using southern Africa as a backdrop, and its liberation history, Jane Duncan examines what an anti-capitalist perspective on intelligence and security powers could look like. Are the police and intelligence agencies even needed, and if so, what should they do and why? What lessons can be learnt from how security was organised during the struggles for liberation in the region? Southern Africa is seeing thousands of people in the region taking to the streets in protests. In response, governments are scrambling to acquire surveillance technologies to monitor these new protest movements. Southern Africa faces no major terrorism threats at the moment, which should make it easier to develop clearer anti-surveillance campaigns than in Europe or the US. Yet, because of tactical and strategic ambivalence about security powers, movements often engage in limited calls for intelligence and policing reforms, and fail to provide an alternative vision for policing and intelligence. Surveillance and Intelligence in Southern Africa examines what that vision could look like. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Theorising the surveillance state -- Is privacy dead? Resistance to surveillance after the Snowden disclosures -- The context of surveillance and social control in South Africa -- Lawful interception in South Africa -- State mass surveillance, tactical surveillance and hacking in South Africa -- Privacy, surveillance and population management: the turn to biometrics -- Stopping the spies: resisting unaccountable surveillance in South Africa -- Conclusion

South Africa has become a nation defined by its protests. Protests can, and do, bring societal problems to public attention in direct, at times dramatic, ways. But governments the world over are also tempted to suppress this right, as they often feel threatened by public challenges to their authority. Apartheid South Africa had a shameful history of repressing protests. The architects of the country's democracy expressed a determination to break with this past and recognise protest as a basic democratic right. Yet, today, there is concern about the violent nature of protests. Protest Nation challenges the dominant narrative that it has become necessary for the state to step in to limit the right to protest in the broader public interest because media and official representations have created a public perception that violence has become endemic to protests. Bringing together data gathered from municipalities, the police, protestor and activist interviews, as well as media reports, the book analyses the extent to which the right to protest is respected in democratic South Africa. It throws a spotlight on the municipal role in enabling or mostly thwarting the right. This book is a call to action to defend the right to protest: a right that is clearly under threat. It also urges South Africans to critique the often-skewed public discourses that inform debates about protests and their limitations

This article draws on the early press coverage of the Marikana massacre to explore the extent to which South Africa's media transformation has delivered an inclusive public sphere that allows for deliberative debate on issues that really matter to the country. While adopting a critical approach to the normative assumptions underpinning the Habermasian public sphere, this article will argue that South Africa's negotiated 'miracle' transition has provided a framework for media transformation that has both opened up spaces for media democratisation and constrained their ability totransform to the extent that they established common public spaces for deliberative debate. South Africa's media transformation has shaped and been shaped by the growing division of South Africa into a two tier society of 'haves' and 'have nots', fuelling social instability, especially among the youth. This article traces the roots of this troubling picture back to the nature of South Africa's incomplete transition.

Destroying Democracy, volume six of the Democratic Marxism series, focuses on how decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded the global democratic project and how, in the process, rising authoritarianism is expressing itself in divisive and exclusionary politics, populist political parties and movements, increased distrust in fact-based information and news, and the withering accountability of state institutions. Over the last four decades, democracy has radically shifted to a market democracy in which all aspects of human, non-human and planetary life are commodified and corporations have become more powerful than states and their citizens. This is how neoliberal capitalism functions at a systemic level and if left unchecked is the greatest threat to democracy and a sustainable planet. The authors home in on four country cases – India, Brazil, South Africa and the United States of America to interrogate issues of politics, ecology, state security, media, access to information and political parties, and affirm the need to reclaim and re-build an expansive and inclusive democracy. The book is an invaluable resource for all who are interested in understanding the threats to democracy and the rising tide of authoritarianism in the global south and the global north.