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Illegitimacy is widely identified as a cause of revolution and other forms of transformative political change, yet when and how it affects these processes is ambiguous. We examine when and how illegitimacy affects the stability of political regimes through a historical analysis of South Africa's National Party (NP) and its apartheid regime, which lasted from 1948 to 1994. Many scholars of South Africa identify the regime's illegitimacy as a catalyst for the end of apartheid. Yet, consistent with assertions that illegitimacy does not result in political instability, the NP maintained power for decades despite a domestic crisis of legitimacy and a global movement that decried the apartheid regime's illegitimacy. Interrogating this contradiction, we detail how the regime's illegitimacy contributed to the negotiated revolution in South Africa when it resulted in unacceptable costs for the allies that the government depended on for survival, motivating those allies to withdraw support. Building on our findings, we detail how turning attention to the ways that illegitimacy affects relationships with allies – rather than particular outcomes, such as revolution or state failure – allows us to account for variation in both when and how illegitimacy matters.

From the 1960s onwards, students and members of the academic community on growing numbers of college and university campuses in the United States chose to confront the issue of apartheid by advocating divestment from corporations or financial institutions with any sort of presence in or relationship with South Africa. Student divestment advocates faced serious opposition from university administrators as well as opponents of institutional divestiture both at home and abroad. Despite these challenges, the academic community in the United States was one of the first arenas where anti-apartheid activism coalesced. This chapter examines the campaigns of students and educators who participated in the debate over divestment – to engage with the South African government and apartheid through dialogue and communication or to disengage completely from the country through withdrawal of financial investments. The anti-apartheid efforts of the academic community at Michigan State University, one of the first large research universities in the United States to confront the issue of apartheid and divestment at the university level and beyond, serves as a window to view academic activism against apartheid. The Southern Africa Liberation Committee (SALC), a consortium of students, faculty, and community members dedicated to aiding the liberation struggle of Southern Africa, led the efforts at Michigan State and collaborated with allies across Michigan and the United States. SALC focused most of its efforts on South Africa, though the organization also confronted the issue of South Africa's controversial occupation of South West Africa and the ongoing civil war in Angola.

This article aims to examine the sustainability of European and SADC states' practice of agreeing bilateral investment agreements (BITs) for the promotion and protection of foreign investments in light of the latter's recent inauguration of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) as a basic norm of regional customary international law and strategy for countering the social and economic legacy of apartheid rule on their territories for over half a century.

The approach taken is textual analysis and deconstruction of emergent SADC BEE legislation, substantive BIT legislation provisions, dispute settlement mechanisms and emergent jurisprudence on the tensions between BEE policy and BIT obligations.

The strong elements of exclusivity between European/SADC BIT dispute settlement mechanisms on the one hand, and the “ouster clauses” of SADC BEE legislation and regulations on the other, are mutually incompatible. This incompatibility threatens the sustainability of the EU/SADC states' BIT dynamic for the promotion and protection of foreign direct investments (FDIs).

Demonstration of BEE as SADC's emergent basic norm of social reconstruction for countering the social and economic legacy of apartheid rule in affected states and implications of that for EU/SADC policy on the promotion and protection of FDIs.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that information is an important effect of documentation. It is in this way that documentation studies distinguishes between concepts of and practices with “information” and “document”: that is, documentation studies helps illuminate how information is created, stabilized, and materialized such that it can emerge and, in turn, how it can then be controlled, deployed, enforced, entrenched, managed, and used in many different ways, in various settings, and for diverse purposes.

This paper presents a conceptual framework on documentation, drawing upon the work of Bernd Frohmann, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Hannah Arendt, @@and Ian Hacking, and applied to a case study of Apartheid South Africa.

Apartheid’s documentation helped achieve apartness at the macro and micro levels of society: on the macro level, the creation and subsequent separation of different racial and ethnic identities were drafted, adopted, and turned into law through legislative documents; on the micro level, these identities were reinforced through routines with personal documents and public signs. This documentation functioned as a documentary apparatus, providing a tangible link between individuals and their official racial and ethnic categories by creating a seamless movement of documents through various institutions; further it helped transform these racial and ethnic identities into lived facts that disciplined and controlled life.

By examining documentation, one can present a fresh and unique perspective to understanding the construction of various things, such as the construction of identities. This conceptual framework contributes to Library and Information Science (LIS) by illuminating the central role of documentation in the creation, stabilization, materialization, and emergence of information. By using Apartheid South Africa as a case study, this paper demonstrates how this framework can be applied to shed new light on different kinds of phenomena in diverse contexts; consequently, it not only contributes to and extends parts of the scholarship on documentation studies within LIS, but also presents new directions for other academic disciplines and multidisciplinary analyses and research.

The five play texts You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock (Phyllis Klotz, 1994), Glass House (Fatima Dike, 2002), Born in the RSA (Barney Simon, 1994), Has Anyone Seen Zandile? (Gcina Mhlophe, 1994), and So What’s New? (Fatima Dike, 1998) are introduced providing a brief insight into the strength of women as they struggle to make a living for their children in the face of extremely adverse political conditions, both in urban areas and in their households, as well as their suffering and grief for the loss of children caught up in the political struggle. Marginalised and struggling African women represented the most vulnerable members of the urban community. The reader is introduced to the voices within the play texts and how they represent both white and black South African women and how they on women’s lives from different backgrounds, classes and race thereby providing insight into their diversity of experiences and the censorial and penal repercussions women were forced to endure for contravening political Afrikaner ideology and statutory law.

Presents findings from a case study looking at African medicine vendors in Durban, South Africa. Compares the culturally repressive apartheid period with the post‐apartheid explosion of self‐realization of the African population. Shows that street vending is still seen as an eyesore and a problem but still plays an important role in the post‐apartheid era as a form of resistance to simplistic African policies.

Apartheid is identified as the outcome of a form of (cultural) protectionism. Understanding the protectionist nature of apartheid in the context of the use of state intervention to protect or promote an interest group, allows one to establish criticisms of this system based on a set of principles. While this analysis provides the means for evaluation of consequences, criticisms based on these principles do not require an evaluation of either the intentions or the consequences of protectionist policies. Most forms of interventionist protection are vulnerable to the same objections which are correctly raised against apartheid. Thus, public choice analysis provides evidence and arguments which suggest that evaluation of interventionist policies should be subjected to stringent criteria.

There are seven main characters of which five are women: Sindiswa, Mia, Susan, Thenjiwe and Nicky. The other two characters, Glen and Zaccaria, represent males from very different socio-economic and political backgrounds. The character of Dumasani, a young boy, is referred to in the play. What makes the play especially significant is that of a cast of seven, five are women. Throughout the play the character of Glen, a spy for the apartheid government, reveals the manipulative and deceitful manner in which the members of the South African police force and political informers carried out their work. He forms relationships with people about whom he professes to care; however, his only concern is that they are able to provide information that will secure financial reward for his spying activities for the apartheid government. Born in the RSA offers the audience an interesting exchange of ideas and thoughts about the political, economic and social situation in apartheid South Africa. Through the exploration of narratives and improvisation a landscape of violence is thrown open. A landscape of violence, that is not only physical, but also psychological. The play presents a complex situation in which violence does not only come from one source but from various sources such as the government, the youth, the opposition parties, the comrades, the private domestic space, subversive activities and political organisations. Any opposition to government policies results in harsher and more extreme violence by the apartheid regime strengthening their oppressive forces.

The herstory of African women is one of sexualised forms of political violence which was used by the apartheid government to control women. African women were the ones who suffered the loss of sons, husbands, brothers and fathers, and who had to fend for themselves in the homelands or Bantustans. Ending women’s oppression was high on the agenda of the democratically elected government in 1994 and women’s groups lobbied consistently to ensure that gender equity was a priority. The violence in South Africa against women can be equated with a civil war on women’s bodies. There is saddening attitude of normalizing the violence committed against women and children. During the apartheid regime the dominant white group used violence to regulate the lives of African people and to remind them constantly of their subordinate status. This was not confined only to public and political spaces such as white and non-white signs on benches, beaches, shops and post offices but also penetrated private and domestic spaces. Black African men and women were subjected to conditions that perpetuated inequality, extreme disparities between the poor and the rich, violence in prisons and humiliating experiences of police harassment. Institutionalised racism led to feelings of inferiority and a lack of self-worth which contributed to acts to violence. The provision of a public space in which to voice women’s experiences of apartheid is essential as it is a contribution to a documentary record of the herstory of South Africa and to uncover the truth about the sacrifices that women have made. There is a crisis of violence against women – we need to seriously consider the dismantling of patriarchy. The concept of emancipation must involve societal transformation, women’s interests and gender interests in order to improve the status of women relative to that of men. The marginal role that women play in the occupational division of labour should be transformed to a central one. The struggle should now become a gender-conscious struggle for the new transformed South Africa.