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This chapter focuses on gender, sexuality and security in post-Apartheid South Africa.

The methodology includes secondary analysis of policy and research with the aim of highlighting and assessing the position of gender, sex and security in post-Apartheid South Africa. Feminist theory and intersectionality are used to discuss issues of sexuality, security, construction of gender relationships and experiences of being a woman in South Africa. The normalisation of violence against women is challenged.

The social implications of this research are that it challenges normalisation of gendered violence, questions gendercide and produces knowledge of a gendered social reality of living in South Africa. Women who consider assault a regular feature of their sexual relationships have been brought into a discourse which includes the liberalisation of sexual expression, claims to new sexual rights and aspirations to power and status through sexual relationships (Posel, 2005a).

Throughout the chapter the achievement of gender equality is problematised and questioned. However, gender and the relationship between power and sex remain at the centre of the inquiry, particularly with reference to the increasing culture of violence and men as the perpetrators of violence against women.

According to Posel ‘one of the most striking features of the post-apartheid era has been the politicization of sexuality’ (2005a, p. 125) and this chapter demonstrates that a response to the violation of the Women’s Charter of Effective Equality, passed in 2000, is a priority as women and families are disproportionately affected by violence in multiple ways.

The death of John F. Kennedy (JFK) was one of the most remarkable facts of the second half of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, it was reflected numerous times in popular culture, including in popular music. In this chapter, I discuss songs published in the 1963–1968 period in which the image of JFK was represented as an idea, a cultural motif or a political myth created, transformed and maintained by artistic means. In song lyrics, a real person (who was a genuinely influential politician) was portrayed as a person who acquired a certain mythical status, stemming from JFK's charismatic features and augmented by his tragic death. Thus, separate from the real political career as the president, JFK serves as a kind of mythological structure used by several artists to generate meanings and mirror cultural iconography present in American culture.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a social issue that continues to haunt humans globally. Despite the magnitude of research that has been conducted, the Sustainable Developmental Goals target 5.2, and the South African proposed National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide, South Africa experiences high incidences of IPV. In heterosexual couples, violence incidences are a concern that requires further research by scholars because cohabiting relationships are an increasing phenomenon within the African context. This study attempts to theorize from an African philosophical stance, focusing particularly on the African psychological perspective. In this chapter, The authors illuminate the nature and forms of violence that manifest in cohabiting relationships. This research explores participants’ experiences of IPV in cohabiting relationships.

This enquiry has been conceptualized using a qualitative constructivism paradigm with in-depth, unstructured one-on-one interviews. Interviews were conducted with 10 participants between the ages of 18 and 24 years recruited from the Thohoyandou Victim Empowerment Programme in Vhembe District in Limpopo Province, South Africa. Thematic analysis was used to generate themes while narrative analysis was used for the participants’ stories. Participants shared their self-reflections on their IPV experiences, deciding to leave their relationships, and threats from their partners when they tried to leave the relationships.

In 1967, Robert N. Bellah famously argued that there existed an “American Civil Religion,” which was distinct from churchly religion and captured the “transcendental” dimension of the American project. In this chapter, I revisit the civil religion concept and reconstruct it along more Weberian lines. Specifically, I argue that the civil religion tradition is one of three competing traditions for thinking about the proper relationship between religion and politics in America; the other two are religious nationalism and liberal secularism. Whereas liberal secularism envisions a complete separation of the religious and political value spheres, and religious nationalism longs for their (re)unification, civil religion aims for a mediating position of partial separation and productive tension. Following Bellah, I argue that the two central strands of the civil religion tradition have been covenant theology and civic republicanism. The body of the chapter sketches out the development of the tradition across a series of national foundings and refoundings, focusing on the writings of leading civil theologians from John Winthrop and John Adams through Abraham Lincoln and John Dewey to Martin King and Barack Obama. The conclusion advances a normative argument for American civil religion – and against liberal secularism and religious nationalism. I contend that liberalism is highly inclusive but insufficiently solidaristic; that religious nationalism is highly solidaristic but insufficiently inclusive; and that only civil religion strikes a proper balance between individual autonomy and the common good.

This chapter contributes to a better knowledge of the role played by the collective entrepreneurship of networks of scientists and doctors in the transfer and adaptation of ideas on hospital organization and management for modern hospitals with new technology, from Western Europe and above all the United States. Literature about new medical technology has demonstrated how medical innovations required changes in human capital and organization in hospitals, to benefit patients in the private and the public hospitals after World War II. The chapter provides an analysis about the origins of the modern North American ideas about professionalization and hospital accreditation, in the consolidation of a modern hospital management and organization. In particular, the focus is in demonstrating how networks of scientists’ entrepreneurs were fundamental drivers in the process of knowledge transfer and the dissemination of these ideas to the large Western European hospitals. More specifically, the chapter studies the diffusion of the new ideas about the large hospital organization and management from the United States to the Western Europe, applied to the Spanish context. Informal networks of doctors applied new ideas developed in the United States to new clinics and hospitals in Spain. Some of them occupied official positions in the key public health administrations and were crucial to introducing the hospital accreditation systems and the US ideas in Spain.

I’ll give it to you as I remember it … a sequence of things that did all happen within a period. So, it’s my recollection of them.¹

Barack Obama's emergence as the leader of the world's most powerful nation stirred much enthusiasm in Africa. This article examines Obama's relationship to Africa and African reactions to Obama – spanning from the time of his election to the United States Senate to the current period of his role as president of the United States. Focusing specifically on Obama's Ghana speech and subsequent African policy initiatives, the article suggests that many Africans are disappointed with Obama's Africa policy and that this is the result of several misperceptions: misperceptions of Obama's power as US president, misperceptions of his moderate political world view, and misperceptions of his cosmopolitan identity as an individual of African ancestry.

In 1967, Robert N. Bellah famously argued that there existed an “American Civil Religion,” which was distinct from churchly religion and captured the “transcendental” dimension of the American project. In this chapter, I revisit the civil religion concept and reconstruct it along more Weberian lines. Specifically, I argue that the civil religion tradition is one of three competing traditions for thinking about the proper relationship between religion and politics in America; the other two are religious nationalism and liberal secularism. Whereas liberal secularism envisions a complete separation of the religious and political value spheres, and religious nationalism longs for their (re)unification, civil religion aims for a mediating position of partial separation and productive tension. Following Bellah, I argue that the two central strands of the civil religion tradition have been covenant theology and civic republicanism. The body of the chapter sketches out the development of the tradition across a series of national foundings and refoundings, focusing on the writings of leading civil theologians from John Winthrop and John Adams through Abraham Lincoln and John Dewey to Martin King and Barack Obama. The conclusion advances a normative argument for American civil religion – and against liberal secularism and religious nationalism. I contend that liberalism is highly inclusive but insufficiently solidaristic; that religious nationalism is highly solidaristic but insufficiently inclusive; and that only civil religion strikes a proper balance between individual autonomy and the common good.