Laurence Piper
Laurence Piper is a Political Scientist at University West, Sweden and the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, interested in local governance, democratic citizenship, and good political judgement. His latest co-edited book is 'Rick Turner's Politics as the Art of the Impossible', with Wits University Press. He is a former President of the South African Association of Political Studies (SAAPS) 2016-8, and the Editor-in-chief of the journal Theoria.
Supervisors: John Lonsdale and Anthony Giddens
Phone: +46 701898255
Address: University West
School of Business, Economics and IT
SE-46186 Trollhättan, Sweden
Supervisors: John Lonsdale and Anthony Giddens
Phone: +46 701898255
Address: University West
School of Business, Economics and IT
SE-46186 Trollhättan, Sweden
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Books by Laurence Piper
Rick Turner was a South African academic and activist who rebelled against apartheid at the height of its power and was assassinated in 1978 when he was 32 years old, but his life and work are testimony to the power of philosophical thinking for humans everywhere. Turner chose to live freely in an unfree time and argued for a non-racial, socialist future in a context where this seemed unimaginable.
This book considers Rick Turner’s challenge that political theorising requires thinking in a utopian way. Turner’s seminal book The Eye of the Needle: Towards a Participatory Democracy in South Africa laid out potent ideas on a radically different political and economic system. His demand was that we work to escape the limiting ideas of the present, carefully design a just future based on shared human values, and act to make it a reality, both politically and in our daily lives.
The contributors to this volume engage critically with Turner’s work on race relations, his relationship with Steve Biko, his views on religion, education and gender oppression, his model of participatory democracy, and his critique of poverty and economic inequality. It’s an important contribution to contemporary thinking and activism.
Papers by Laurence Piper
Aims and objectives: This article examines the impact of policy engagement on political relations between local government and vulnerable communities.
Methods: The overall methodology of the article is qualitative, using an illustrative case-study research design to unpack the subjective experiences of both government officials and residents of vulnerable communities. Primary data included many primary documents, direct observation of the engagements and post-event interviews.
Findings: First, the engagement process created new ‘invented’ spaces for the representation of community perspectives to the city, and also the city’s perspective to the community. Second, the engagement facilitated community self-representation through educating community members to advocate for their own ideas in these new invented spaces. Thirdly, this engagement tended to be more constructive and deliberative than polarising and confrontational.
Discussion and conclusions: Drawing on the theoretical framework of ‘political mediation’, the policy engagement process is characterised as a positive instance of democratic mediation through ‘empowered representation’, with some specified limitations.
Keywords: climate resilience, participatory research, representation, democratic mediation
Rick Turner was a South African academic and activist who rebelled against apartheid at the height of its power and was assassinated in 1978 when he was 32 years old, but his life and work are testimony to the power of philosophical thinking for humans everywhere. Turner chose to live freely in an unfree time and argued for a non-racial, socialist future in a context where this seemed unimaginable.
This book considers Rick Turner’s challenge that political theorising requires thinking in a utopian way. Turner’s seminal book The Eye of the Needle: Towards a Participatory Democracy in South Africa laid out potent ideas on a radically different political and economic system. His demand was that we work to escape the limiting ideas of the present, carefully design a just future based on shared human values, and act to make it a reality, both politically and in our daily lives.
The contributors to this volume engage critically with Turner’s work on race relations, his relationship with Steve Biko, his views on religion, education and gender oppression, his model of participatory democracy, and his critique of poverty and economic inequality. It’s an important contribution to contemporary thinking and activism.
Aims and objectives: This article examines the impact of policy engagement on political relations between local government and vulnerable communities.
Methods: The overall methodology of the article is qualitative, using an illustrative case-study research design to unpack the subjective experiences of both government officials and residents of vulnerable communities. Primary data included many primary documents, direct observation of the engagements and post-event interviews.
Findings: First, the engagement process created new ‘invented’ spaces for the representation of community perspectives to the city, and also the city’s perspective to the community. Second, the engagement facilitated community self-representation through educating community members to advocate for their own ideas in these new invented spaces. Thirdly, this engagement tended to be more constructive and deliberative than polarising and confrontational.
Discussion and conclusions: Drawing on the theoretical framework of ‘political mediation’, the policy engagement process is characterised as a positive instance of democratic mediation through ‘empowered representation’, with some specified limitations.
Keywords: climate resilience, participatory research, representation, democratic mediation
where a micro-enterprise census and business operator survey was conducted in 2011 (Charman et al, 2015). The chapter argues that despite the significant number of informal businesses in South African townships, the state continues to pursue efforts that either prevent formalisation or circumscribe informal activities. At the heart of our argument is the assertion that the informal economic practices of the urban poor constitute a ‘lived economy’ whose dynamics are largely ‘unseen’ by the South African state and thus ‘disallowed’ in most policies. Consequently, informality is more the result of exclusion from state policy rather than exit by informal actors.
Illustrated through the case of two newspapers in Hout Bay, the chapter shows how the main community newspaper, The Sentinel, gives voice overwhelmingly to white and wealthy residents of Hout Bay; views that at least some black residents perceive as racist. Further, attempts by ANC-aligned local leaders to counter the perceived bias of The Sentinel through their own paper, Hout Bay Speak, does not necessarily give voice to all poor, black residents. This is most evident in its deliberately ignoring the existence of community leaders not aligned with the party hierarchy in Hout Bay. This racialised and partisan character of state-society relations is a significant constraint on constructing a more inclusive public sphere in Hout Bay, and indeed we suggest, in much of urban South Africa.
Hence, to meet these twin demands, the methodology of the chapter has been to examine both the state-driven processes of decentralisation and public participation, and the society driven response, particularly through examining the size, scope and orientation of civil society, and the character of local state-society relations down time. This has been done for every country (see Appendix Two). From this survey some general lessons are observable, including that stable and effective governance is necessary but not sufficient for decentralisation and local democratisation; that formal liberal democracy is necessary to generalise favourable conditions for public participation in local governance; that local state-building and local democracy-building can be mutually reinforcing; that time helps to improve public participation practices; that not all civil society is good for public participation; and that independent and community-based civil society is central to making participation work.
This argument does not deny the resonance of Zuluness as a social identity, far from it. Indeed there exist several constructions of Zuluness which vary according to geography, gender, race and so on. Nevertheless, it is argued that all resistance nationalisms of the transition were, to use Hutchinson’s terms, ‘political’ rather than ‘cultural’ nationalisms; that is, they were driven by élite political interests rather than by popularly-rooted identity politics.[1994] Consequently, not only is Zulu nationalism dead for the foreseeable future, but the evidence suggests that most Zulu people see themselves in ways not inconsistent with a multi-cultural or ‘rainbow’ South African nation.
Ian Palmer and Nishendra Moodley,
as well as one of South Africa’s leading academic
urbanists, Professor Sue Parnell,
Building a Capable State tackles the hard
question of whether the post-apartheid state
is up to delivering rights-based, sustainable
development, and more specifically the task
of providing local services like water, electricity,
roads and housing.