The end of apartheid in South Africa broke down political barriers, extending to all races the formal rights of citizenship, including the right to participate in free elections and parliamentary democracy. But South Africa remains one of the most economically polarized nations in the world. In The Politics of Necessity Elke Zuern forcefully argues that working toward greater socio-economic equality—access to food, housing, land, jobs—is crucial to achieving a successful and sustainable democracy. Drawing on interviews with local residents and activists in South Africa’s impoverished townships during more than a decade of dramatic political change, Zuern tracks the development of community organizing and reveals the shifting challenges faced by poor citizens. Under apartheid, township residents began organizing to press the government to address the basic material necessities of the poor and expanded their demands to include full civil and political rights. While the movement succeeded in gaining formal political rights, democratization led to a new government that instituted neo-liberal economic reforms and sought to minimize protest. In discouraging dissent and failing to reduce economic inequality, South Africa’s new democracy has continued to disempower the poor. By comparing movements in South Africa to those in other African and Latin American states, this book identifies profound challenges to democratization. Zuern asserts the fundamental indivisibility of all human rights, showing how protest movements that call attention to socio-economic demands, though often labeled a threat to democracy, offer significant opportunities for modern democracies to evolve into systems of rule that empower all citizens.
Heroes, villains, victims, and minions are more important than ever before in our politics and culture. In the era of television, Twitter, and Facebook, groups and individuals constantly battle over their reputations. One of the best ways to gain power is to persuade others that you are competent, courageous, and benevolent, while your opponents are none of these. Thus, character work consists of more than simple claims of fact; societies build their solidarity and policies out of admiration for heroes but also outrage over villains. Recent political analysis has ignored the great characters of the past in favor of frames, heuristics, codes, and identities. In Public Characters, James M. Jasper, Michael P. Young, and Elke Zuern argue that character, reputation, and images matter in politics, and social life more generally, as they help mobilize people and their passions. First, they focus on the political construction of openly constructed and debated public characters to show how we can allocate praise and blame, identify social problems, cement identities and allegiances, develop policies, and articulate our moral intuitions through them. The authors demonstrate the nuances of characters and their interactions across a range of sources-including Shakespeare, Game of Thrones, Renaissance sculpture, modern comic books, Alexander the Great, and Bernie Madoff-all the while showing how public characters are used in political rhetoric. Finally, they complicate these characters by considering their transformations: when victims manage to become heroes and the way traditional moral characters have evolved over time to correspond with what different cultures admire, detest, or pity. This rich, detailed, and wide-ranging analysis of personal images and reputation marks a timely and crucial contribution for sociologists and political scientists concerned with the cultural dimensions of political life.
Heroes, villains, victims, and minions are more important than ever before in our politics and culture. In the era of television, Twitter, and Facebook, groups and individuals constantly battle over their reputations. One of the best ways to gain power is to persuade others that you are competent, courageous, and benevolent, while your opponents are none of these. Thus, character work consists of more than simple claims of fact; societies build their solidarity and policies out of admiration for heroes but also outrage over villains. Recent political analysis has ignored the great characters of the past in favor of frames, heuristics, codes, and identities. In Public Characters, James M. Jasper, Michael P. Young, and Elke Zuern argue that character, reputation, and images matter in politics, and social life more generally, as they help mobilize people and their passions. First, they focus on the political construction of openly constructed and debated public characters to show how we can allocate praise and blame, identify social problems, cement identities and allegiances, develop policies, and articulate our moral intuitions through them. The authors demonstrate the nuances of characters and their interactions across a range of sources-including Shakespeare, Game of Thrones, Renaissance sculpture, modern comic books, Alexander the Great, and Bernie Madoff-all the while showing how public characters are used in political rhetoric. Finally, they complicate these characters by considering their transformations: when victims manage to become heroes and the way traditional moral characters have evolved over time to correspond with what different cultures admire, detest, or pity. This rich, detailed, and wide-ranging analysis of personal images and reputation marks a timely and crucial contribution for sociologists and political scientists concerned with the cultural dimensions of political life.
The end of apartheid in South Africa broke down political barriers, extending to all races the formal rights of citizenship, including the right to participate in free elections and parliamentary democracy. But South Africa remains one of the most economically polarized nations in the world. In The Politics of Necessity Elke Zuern forcefully argues that working toward greater socio-economic equality—access to food, housing, land, jobs—is crucial to achieving a successful and sustainable democracy. Drawing on interviews with local residents and activists in South Africa’s impoverished townships during more than a decade of dramatic political change, Zuern tracks the development of community organizing and reveals the shifting challenges faced by poor citizens. Under apartheid, township residents began organizing to press the government to address the basic material necessities of the poor and expanded their demands to include full civil and political rights. While the movement succeeded in gaining formal political rights, democratization led to a new government that instituted neo-liberal economic reforms and sought to minimize protest. In discouraging dissent and failing to reduce economic inequality, South Africa’s new democracy has continued to disempower the poor. By comparing movements in South Africa to those in other African and Latin American states, this book identifies profound challenges to democratization. Zuern asserts the fundamental indivisibility of all human rights, showing how protest movements that call attention to socio-economic demands, though often labeled a threat to democracy, offer significant opportunities for modern democracies to evolve into systems of rule that empower all citizens.
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