Search

Arye Oded, Africa and Israel: A Unique Case in Israeli Foreign Relations (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2018), 416 pp. Hardback, $74.95.Alexandre Kedar, Ahmad Amara, and Oren Yiftachel, Emptied Lands: A Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 424 pp. Hardback, $70.Michal Kravel-Tovi, When the State Winks: The Performance of Conversion in Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 315 pp. Hardback, $61.97.Maoz Rosenthal, Israel’s Governability Crisis: Quandaries, Unstructured Institutions, and Adaptation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 162 pp. Hardback, $68.Brent E. Sasley and Harold M. Waller, Politics in Israel: Governing a Complex Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 368 pp. Paperback, $49.95.Ran Abramitzky, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 360 pages. Hardback, $29.95.Edna Lomsky-Feder and Orna Sasson-Levy, Women Soldiers and Citizenship in Israel: Gendered Encounters with the State (London: Routledge, 2018), 186 pp. Hardback, $98.

The analysis of the political process commences with the study of high politics, with regime efforts to lay down procedures for decisionmaking and to create the mechanisms for their enforcement.1 From the perspective of rulers, two core concerns guide this undertaking. First, how do rulers consolidate and entrench their position at the center: what rules do they establish and what patterns of decisionmaking do they encourage to increase their power? Second, how do they gain the compliance of their constituencies: what support bases do they construct and what means do they devise to maintain these alliances?

In the first part of this book we examine the types of organizations devised by Africans at various levels to mobilize themselves, their allies, and their resources to deal with their constantly changing surroundings, and we introduce the basic concepts of contemporary African politics: state, social groups, ethnicity, and class. Who are the main political actors in Africa today? What interests do they have and what resources do they control? How are they structured? In what ways are they connected? And what are their capabilities and their weaknesses? In Chapter 2 we focus on the consolidation and alteration of formal government institutions, and in Chapter 3 we deal with the structures of social and economic life. Because state and society are analytical categories that intersect and frequently overlap, Chapter 4 is devoted specifically to the investigation of the many forms of state-society relations that have evolved in Africa in the postcolonial period. These relationships provide the basis for understanding how decisions are made, why certain policies are adopted, how they affect various groups, and with what results.

As the world enters the twenty-first century, African states and societies are enmeshed in a process of global reordering. The terms we have used to describe contemporary African politics—“vibrant,” “fluid,” “rich,” “complex”—are especially appropriate today. Despite the economic and social problems faced by most African governments, the continent is characterized by a tremendous political vitality. Indeed, as the 1990s so forcefully demonstrated, the very difficulties that Africans have faced since independence have prompted experimentation with new political forms and directions.

The travails of economic development have played a defining role in African states and societies. Economic growth and transition are clearly important as sources of popular welfare, material output, and public revenues. Economic change also affects the composition of social groups, as well as their relative opportunities and constraints. Material conditions affect the resources available to key political actors. At the same time, political regimes and the balance of societal interests are often crucial for economic outcomes. The reciprocal interactions of economic and political factors are evident in the fortunes of state-building and social mobilization in Africa, as well as in the more obvious aspects of economic performance. This section considers the structures, attributes, and prevailing patterns of economic development in Africa, with special attention to the political context of economic policy.

Our political interaction approach emphasizes the complexity of the group demands that the African state faces. It assumes a constant engagement of rival interests in the contemporary political arena, an interaction among various groups mobilized to secure public resources from those in authority. These groups—based on ethnicity, region, race, gender, religion, generation, class, and so forth—may be distinct in terms of origins and appeals, but they share common features in the way they organize to engage in a dynamic interplay of conflict and collaboration. In some instances cultural communities succeed in uniting people for some of the primary purposes of existence—cultural fulfillment, belongingness, psychological and physical security, and social intercourse; where this occurs, such communities can play an important role in gathering group members around an intermediary for the purpose of making collective demands on state decisionmakers. The range of these demands varies considerably. Not only do group representatives lay claim to a full share of public political power, protections, economic resources, administrative positions, contracts, awards, and scholarships but they make appeals, sometimes more conflict-laden in their effects, for broad grants of political autonomy and independence.

On April 26, 1994, South Africans voted in the first nonracial universal suffrage election in the country’s violent history and elected Nelson Mandela president. The election culminated decades of popular struggle against apartheid, a system of racial domination whose hallmarks were racial violence and privilege. In 1960, Africa’s “year of independence” in much of the continent, the ruling government in South Africa banned the leading nationalist movement, the African National Congress (ANC). Not until thirty years later would the government lift its ban on the ANC and other antiapartheid political parties. The intervening period saw recurrent outbursts of violent protest and ever growing black political mobilization within the country, and increasing international pressure against apartheid in the rest of the world. Mandela’s election brought one chapter in the history of Africa to a close—the era of formal white domination of African states—and began a new era in South Africa’s history: an era faced with the challenge of transforming a racist, ethnically dominated state and society into a nonracial democracy.

Africa has been prolific in the production of states. Home to 10 percent of the world’s population and occupying about 20 percent of its landmass, the continent contains roughly 30 percent of the world’s states. More than fifty territorial units have been carved out of the deserts, highlands, forests, and savannas of the continent and its neighboring islands. From the Mediterranean to the Cape, Africa presents an intriguing mosaic of states whose relations are complex and diverse.

The preceding chapter described the historical evolution of African economies and the range of strategies and policies that guided African regimes in the decades following independence. Economic performance weakened considerably throughout sub-Saharan Africa in the course of the 1970s, and a number of countries displayed serious problems. As leaders experimented with domestic economic policies, they also sought to reduce dependence through changes in regional and global economies. These concerns were evident in negotiations with foreign capital, changing trade relationships, regional integration schemes, and collective efforts to change economic relations between the North and the South. The first part of this chapter will discuss these approaches to altering Africa’s international economic relations.

The African continent encompasses a rich mosaic of peoples, cultures, ecological settings, and historical experiences. Africa’s vast expanse of 11,677,240 square miles (30,244,050 square kilometers) stretches from the Mediterranean in the north to the meeting point of the Atlantic and Indian oceans in the south. The 500 million people of Africa (roughly 10 percent of the globe’s population) are as diverse as the terrain they inhabit. The blacks and Arabs who live on the continent (together with small concentrations of Asians and whites) speak more than eight hundred languages, belong to hundreds of ethnic groups, and over the years have embraced many animist belief systems as well as all the great religions (most notably, Christianity and Islam). Although 70 percent of the continent’s people live in the rural areas and make their living as farmers and pastoralists, rapidly growing ancient and new cities are also sprinkled over the map of Africa. Subsistence agriculture is sustained alongside hi-tech industries; the world’s greatest mineral reserves are to be found in regions of the most abject poverty; universities thrive where illiteracy still prevails.

Formal decisionmaking procedures and practices, high politics, are only one (albeit key) component of the political process. These formal procedures may be part of, subsist alongside, or stand in opposition to the deep politics of society. Deep politics are concerned not only with the way power is exercised but also with the purposes of governance; they may present challenges to policy, to the incumbents of public office, or to the dominant political vision.1 At issue, therefore, are questions of authority and power as well as legitimacy. Participation, collaboration, cooperation, cynicism, dissatisfaction, protest, rebellion, insurrection, revolt, civil war, disengagement, and withdrawal are all ways of reacting to specific regimes; they may also be profound responses to reigning political doctrines.2 As a consequence, patterns of political conflict have a direct bearing on policy decisions and on the dynamics of civil order and disorder in African countries. They also touch upon the fundamentals of political organization, on the creation of a civic public.

The political history of Africa since independence, so diverse in its details, has been marked not only by the establishment of identifiable norms and procedures but also by its fluidity and movement. No one set of rules, practices, or processes has remained unaltered—as the concept of politics infers—by the dynamics of state action and social response. The question of political change is therefore central to understanding the course of political processes over time. Political transitions have been set in motion either from within, through the initiative of incumbents themselves, or by individuals and groups outside the circle of officeholders, frequently employing violent political means. Each of these methods has involved some dislocation and at times major upheavals with grave human consequences. Whether they have also brought about more significant changes in the organization of the public arena or in its practices is still open to question.

South Africa is the last frontier in the long battle for the enfranchisement of black Africans. In 1960, Africa’s “year of independence” in much of the continent, the ruling white government in South Africa banned the leading nationalist movement, the African National Congress (ANC). Not until 30 years later would the government lift its ban on the ANC and other antiapartheid political parties. The intervening period had witnessed recurrent outbursts of violent protest and ever-growing black political mobilization within the country, and increasing international pressure against apartheid in the rest of the world. With the release of the ANC’s most prominent leader, Nelson Mandela, in February 1990, South African politics entered an uncharted period of negotiation over the new political system. In this chapter, we examine the special case of an African political system in which the European colonists came and stayed.