In recent years the interest in the patterns and policies of South African sport has grown. This book examines the increasingly complex issue of race, class and sport in the context of South African social relations. The author disputes evaluations made purely on the question of race, maintaining that it is important to examine the complex interaction between racial and class dynamics as a background for understanding the South African way of life. The book demonstrates that sport must be understood in the context of the ensemble of social relations characterizing the South African social formation.

Sixteen well-known historians and social scientists explore the issues of ethnic boundary-making and the construction of nationalist ideologies and political consciousness against South Africa's changing political economy and class composition since the era of the mineral discoveries in the late nineteenth century.

This book documents the emergence and development of the theory of racial capitalism in apartheid South Africa. It interrogates the specificity of this theory in the South African context and draws lessons for its global applicability. Racism and capitalism have a long history of entanglement. Nowhere is this more evident than in South Africa, where colonial and apartheid regimes used explicit systems of racial hierarchy to shore up profit. It is therefore no surprise that South Africa has represented a key site for thinking about the role that racism plays in shaping state policy, labor markets, patterns of capital accumulation, and working-class struggle. Illuminating these dynamics, this volume develops a distinctive South African tradition of thought about the relationship between racism and capitalism. The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism contributes to a burgeoning literature on the concept of “racial capitalism,” the origins of which many commentators trace back to apartheid South Africa. It pays particular attention to the crucial role of anti-apartheid activists as theorists, whose important insights remain relevant for scholars and activists around the globe. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Provides the first book-length examination of the political economy of media transformation in South Africa. By locating South Africa within continental and global contexts of changes and with theoretical incisiveness and praxis-oriented understanding, the authors depict a media system at the forefront of transition both in terms of shifting representations of race and class and in terms of ownership and readership changes.

Over the past 20 years the global political economy has experienced its most profound shifts since the onset of the industrial revolution. In South Africa and the World, Mills Soko reflects on some of the salient issues that have pervaded public discourse during this time, analysing them within the context of the contemporary South African political economy and of the country's position in the world. Arranged thematically, the essays were all written during a defining period in recent history, a period that has witnessed, among others, the accession of China to the WTO, the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US, the invention of the iPad, the birth of Facebook, the 2008/9 global financial crisis, Brexit and the global coronavirus pandemic which began at the end of 2019. The turbulent multipolar world demands visionary political and economic leadership, supported by institutions well attuned to contemporary conditions. Such leadership is in short supply. Nor is the existing institutional architecture sufficiently equipped to deal with a complex array of economic, social, environmental, technological and demographic challenges. Mills Soko highlights what has not worked in terms of politics, leadership, foreign policy, the economy, the African development trajectory, corporate ethics, international trade, global governance, and the thread which underlies all these issues – the importance of strong, decisive and accountable leadership. He counters his criticism with what has worked and offers views on how some of the problems that have constrained progress in South Africa and the world can be solved. A central message emerges from his writings: leadership and governance matter, whether in the national or international context. It is a message that permeates all the chapters in the book. And it goes to the heart of what South Africa has gone through over the past two decades and where it is today.

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