Justin van der Merwe

The death of Nelson Mandela on 5 December 2013 was in a sense a wake-up call for South Africans, and a time to reflect on what has been achieved since `those magnificent days in late April 1994’ (as the editors of this volume put it) `when South Africans of all colours voted for the first time in a democratic election’. In a time of recall and reflection it is important to take account, not only of the dramatic events that grip the headlines, but also of other signposts that indicate the shape and characteristics of a society. The New South African Review looks, every year, at some of these signposts, and the essays in this fourth volume of the series again examine and analyse a broad spectrum of issues affecting the country. They tackle topics as diverse as the state of organised labour; food retailing; electricity generation; access to information; civil courage; the school system; and – looking outside the country to its place in the world – South Africa’s relationships with north-east Asia, with Israel and with its neighbours in the southern African region. Taken together, these essays give a multidimensional perspective on South Africa’s democracy as it turns twenty, and will be of interest to general readers while being particularly useful to students and researchers.

This book presents a new theory explaining underdevelopment in the global South and tests whether financial inputs, the government-business-media (GBM) complex and spatiotemporal influences drive human development. Despite the entrance of emerging powers and new forms of aid, trade and investment, international political-economic practices still support well-established systems of capital accumulation, to the detriment of the global South. Global asymmetrical accumulation is maintained by ‘affective’ (consent-forming hegemonic practices) and ‘infrastructural’ (uneven economic exchanges) labours and by power networks. The message for developing countries is that ‘robust’ GBMs can facilitate human development and development is constrained by spatiotemporal limitations. This work theorizes that aid and foreign direct investment should be viewed with caution and that in the global South these investments should not automatically be assumed to be drivers of development.