In a prison cell in Johannesburg in 1953 after months of solitary confinement Ruth First, one of South Africa's finest investigative joumalists, attempted to commit suicide. In a sense, information for this thesis has been gathered around the question of why First felt her life had reached a point where she wished it extinguished. The answer involves who she was, what she believed in and her perception at that moment in time of the magnitude of the defeat of all she had worked for. But this question has broader implications - it has been asked because its answer throws light not only on the particular joumalist, but on the radical press and on the political movements which gave it both life and readers. This study is divided into six sections: Origins and influences looks, firstly, at early Jewish migrations and Ruth's life up to the end of her schooling in Johannesburg, then at her university years and the influence on her life of the Communist Party of South Africa. A vigorously provocative life traces debates which led to the formation of the South African Congress of Democrats and the Congress Alliance. It looks, also, at the political influence of the white Left and the radical social fratemity. Trumpeters of freedom locates the origins of the radical press tradition in South Africa, then looks at the development of the two publications to which Ruth devoted most of her time: The Guardian/New Age and Fighting Talk. Writing left focuses on First's writing in connection with three campaigns: the farm labour and the potato boycott, womens' passes and the bus boycotts. These chapters are not a history of these campaigns, but an analysis of the influence on them of First's joumalism. Word wars is about the Treason Trial of 1956. The contention here is that the trial, in which First was one of the 'chief co-conspirators ', not only put the Congress Alliance in the dock, but was about the definition of three words: communism, violence and treason. In many ways it was a trial of the language of the Left, the tools of First's trade. Shifting focus looks at the period after Sharpeville and the 1960 State of Emergency. It considers the shift in First's writing necessitated by greater political oppression, a banning order and her exploration of the writing of books. Chapter 12 considers the massive setback to the Congress Alliance of the Rivonia Trial and the tactical errors which led the Congress leadership to the conclusion that armed struggle would succeed at that point in time. The final chapter is about First's detention, and her perceived personal defeat which resulted in her attempted suicide. The Postscript looks at First's successful attempts to come to terms with both a political and personal defeat. The work effectively ends, however, with her departure from South Africa.

African Cinema is an entity as diverse as the various countries, languages and cultures on this continent. The entertainment value of Cinema has been more popular than the study of its ideological significance, but nevertheless in a contemporary Africa where politics affect the social, cultural and economical survival of its citizens, Cinema can be used as a valuable asset and a powerful means of communication that can conscientize and educate African audiences. Thomas Hobbes’s leadership model and political theory of sovereignty, though a XVIIth century framework, can theoretically contribute in the analysis of the representation of African leadership styles in Cinema. This article analyzes four fiction films representing four different political leaders in, respectively, South Africa, Uganda, Cameroon and Nigeria. A film content analysis will explore the different representation of leadership styles, the personality of each leader, the power struggles in each society and how this may suggest value judgments about African leadership to the films’ various target audiences.

In this research study, the researcher investigates obstacles faced by news journalists in investigative journalism in a democracy as experienced in Botswana. Investigative journalism and democracy have a symbiotic relationship. This relationship serves to make the public sensitive about, and aware of, injustices and undemocratic practices and it could, ultimately, contribute significantly to the process of democratization (Faure 2005: 155). Unfortunately, in their endeavor to keep up with the ethos of investigative journalism, journalists meet obstacles that range from legal to financial issues. The author investigates those factors that reporters in Botswana rate as having the greatest impact on their investigative efforts. The study also assesses the attitudes of journalists in the country towards the roles and responsibilities of the fourth estate, which supports investigative reporting. Investigative journalism is centered on disclosure, described by six elements: public interest, theme, accuracy, follow-up reports, consequences and questioning the status quo (Faure 2005:160; Marron 1995:1). The researcher interrogated the current practice of investigative journalism in newsrooms in the Botswana context, by means of a self-administered questionnaire. A cumulative sum of scores of each rank order for each obstacle was used to observe the one rated the most impeding by Botswana journalists. Elementary descriptive statistics in the form of percentages were used to assess attitudes of Botswana journalists towards investigative journalism. The same method was used to assess the proportion of investigative stories in four sampled Botswana newspapers. The contents of the respective newspapers were assessed against the five elements of investigative reporting that include: theme, public interest, questioning the status quo, accuracy, follow-up reports and consequences.

In recent years, philosophers of social science have drawn attention to the contributions of suggestive models or metaphors to political understanding. In doing so, they have suggested a distinction between models or archetypes of great scope and generality — politics seen as mechanical or organic relations, for example — and the individual metaphorical utterances in which they are presented. Historians of political thought have made a similar distinction between 'languages' or 'ideologies' which prescribe norms and conventions for political argument, and the expression and development of these languages and ideologies in texts. This dissertation shows these two developments to be complementary by investigating the extent to which political languages or ideologies are themselves made up of suggestive models of political activity. Taking our point of departure from Max Black's suggestion that a metaphor be seen as "the tip of a submerged model," we shall look for such models in groups of political metaphors sharing the same theme. Analysis of the concept 'metaphor' shows that understanding a metaphorical utterance is conditional upon a reader recreating a context in which the ground of the metaphorical identification is rendered intelligible by the point of the utterance. This distinguishes political metaphors from metaphors used in explanatory' or literary contexts. The principled strategies which authors and audiences use to produce and comprehend metaphors in political contexts are then shown to utilize existing conceptual classifications in the form of 'metaphorical fields' embedded in political discourse. These fields bring together abstract metaphor themes and concrete political doctrines to create political metaphors. In a field, the political value of 'imagery' — medicine, theatre, parts of the body or family relations — remains relatively fixed. Using illustrations mainly from metaphorical fields in which politics is seen as a therapeutic activity, political metaphors are shown to functions as maps, orienting men in a political world that is their own creation. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

My dissertation examines the role played by the surrealist object in the avant-garde strategies of the French surrealist group, in the difficult political circumstances of the 1930s. In my reading, the surrealist object is located in a critical relation to modern art; it depends on the invention of collage for its own realization, but it also attempts to supersede modernism through an act of desublimation, the return of art to its sexual origins. A n understanding of this critical relation is established through Peter Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, through the use of psychoanalytic theory, and through an understanding of the difference between Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. The object's invention in 1931 is then related to the cultural debates occurring on the revolutionary left in France and the Soviet Union. The surrealists wish to achieve an alliance with the Parti Communiste Francais, but avoid the politicization of the cultural field undertaken by the Communists in both countries. They answer the demand for the politicization of art with the supersession of art, for which the object provides a model. In the 1930s, the surrealists develop the notion of a revolutionary science that would forge a relation between action and interpretation. They attempt to indicate such a relation in a number of experimental texts, taking unconscious thought as the object of their investigation. As a central category of their reflection in this period, the surrealist objects are often given as extra-aesthetic examples of such thought in physical form. The rise of the Popular Front and the move of the P.C.F. towards a reformist politics presented a crisis for the surrealist movement. A number of surrealists, like Tristan Tzara, Rene Char and Roger Caillois, split with their group in order to work with the Popular Front, while the larger part of the surrealist group broke with the P.C.F. and the Soviet Union. The break with Stalinism led the surrealists to the point of an alliance with the modern art they had once claimed to supersede; from now on, interpretation would be preserved, at the expense of action. The surrealist object, which had exemplified the relation between action and interpretation, begins to recede from view after 1936, as the avant-garde project that had brought it into being became increasingly difficult to sustain. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

This study examines how deforestation in Malaysia is framed as an economic issue fought out in the political arena using cultural codes as an entry point to examining the political tensions of contemporary Malaysia. Three themes recur throughout this work. The first theme concerns the centrality of resources in Malaysia's colonial and post-colonial political economy. The second theme concerns the displacement of the anxieties of national and cultural survival onto the contests over economic rights. And the third theme is the way collective memories 'flesh out' contemporary contests between the state and civil society. In the sense that the three themes are inter-related, this study traces the twinned construction, and opposition, of the two central ideas: of 'nature' in the form of the rainforest and 'race' in the guise of nation. In keeping with the role of memory in present-day social and political engagements, this study weaves both archival and contemporary material to trace the construction of the history, imagery and vocabulary that have been mapped onto the physical space of the rainforest. I explore the production of the cultural codes through this mapping process that are then used to articulate the contests over the rainforest. These codes are the consequence of negotiations that reflect the unstable alliances and inconsistent identities of contemporary Malaysia, and they are the legacies, albeit translated, of colonialism. In retracing the contests over and about the forests, I hope to shed some light on why Malaysians made, and continue to make, decisions that appear to work against them. The decisions affecting the fate of the rainforest reflects choices made about the kind of society Malaysians live with. Hence, the three core chapters of this study examine military, political/cultural and economic contests and negotiations surrounding the birth of the Malayan/Malaysian nation-state through their impacts on the rainforest. By acknowledging how much of Malaysia's contemporary politics is its colonial legacy, I hope to highlight the trade-off we have made between limited political engagement and development. To accept that we cannot protect basic rights as the price of economic success is to continue to live within the racist framework of colonialism that human rights are only for some humans. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation examines the characteristic features and problems of a party/movement as they pertain to the Family Coalition Party of British Columbia (FCP). The FCP is a minor provincial political party in British Columbia that was founded in 1991 to provide a formal political voice for pro-life and pro-family supporters in the province. After years of frustrated activism within the pro-life and pro-family movements and ineffectual political representation, the founders of the FCP sought to establish a political access point that could provide a more direct route to the province's political decision-making process. The result was the formation of the Family Coalition Party, a conservative political organization that supports social policies which are resolutely pro-life and promote a vision for the restoration of what is understood as the traditional family. The primary goal of the party is the advancement and implementation of such policies, with electoral success pursued as a secondary goal. This agenda renders the FCP an organization that uses a political party form to perform social movement work or functions. In this regard, the FCP exhibits the hybrid duality of a party/movement in the tradition of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the Green Parties of Canada and Germany. In developing a sociopolitical and ideological profile of the Family Coalition Party and its politics of the family, its historical roots are traced back to the conservative political writings of Edmund Burke and brought forward to the current era of late twentieth century neoconservatism. The pro-family movement (PFM), of which the FCP is a part, is examined comparatively in the United States, where it exists in its most mature form under the auspices of such Christian Right organizations as the Christian Coalition, and in British Columbia, where the movement remains in a state of relative political infancy and organizational disunity. Despite the disparities in organizational maturation, the movements in both countries share a high degree of ideological resonance concerning their opposition to feminism, abortion, euthanasia, and reproductive technologies, and their support for increased parental control in education, programmes that will promote the traditional family, and a minimalist state. To understand the duality of the Family Coalition Party as a party/movement, it is first analyzed as a social movement organization (SMO) and then as a minor party in Canadian politics. Using contemporary social movement theory, the Family Coalition Party is found to exhibit the same traits and problems as those typically characteristic of the New Social Movements, despite the ideological disparities between the two. To this end, the FCP can be understood as a sub-type of New Social Movement, a Resurgence Movement, as it attempts to simultaneously resist one type of social change while promoting another by working to re-establish a diminishing set of normative cultural beliefs. As a minor political party of protest, the FCP, with reference to relevant political science research, is seen to embody the motivations, features and difficulties of minor parties as evidenced in the Social Credit League, the CCF, and the Green Party. In this regard the emergence of the FCP is symptomatic of a cadre party system that fails to adequately represent issues important to an aggrieved segment of the population and also experiences the institutional obstacles of the Westminster parliamentary model of political representation. In examining the FCP as a party/movement, four ways of analytically relating political parties and social movements are reviewed before a fusionist perspective is used to identify the characteristic features and problems of party/movements. Three sources of tension (organizational, institutional and cultural) are subsequently identified. These tensions are one of two types: they are either difficulties unique to party/movements, created by the deliberate fusing of party form with movement function; otherwise, they are problems common to every SMO or minor political party striving to achieve political legitimacy and potency. For party/movements, the challenge of resolving this latter set of problems is exacerbated beyond the level of difficulty experienced by single identity organizations precisely because of their dual identity. The experience of other party/movements, such as the CCF and the Green Parties of Canada and Germany, suggests that their specific tensions make it difficult to maintain a dual identity, with a drift towards either political institutionalization or dissolution likely, if not inevitable. While the Family Coalition Party is presently maintaining its party/movement nature, its future as such is in doubt unless the tensions of fusion that it now faces are effectively managed. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

With few exceptions, not enough attention has been paid to the phenomenon of ethnic minority rule over hostile majorities in the studies of ethnic conflict. This thesis attempts to account for the ability of ethnic minorities to rule over hostile majorities for continuous periods of time, and to devise a theory for the study of this phenomenon by comparing three cases: the Alawis in Syria, the Tutsis in Burundi and the Sunni Muslim minority in Iraq. The major argument of the thesis is that the phenomenon in question does not occur randomly. There are certain conditions that motivate an ethnic minority to seek political power, and to be able to attain it and maintain continuous rule despite the hostility of the majority. Naturally, each case has its particular characteristics, yet common patterns underlying minority rule over hostile majorities can be found, and an analytical framework can bJe devised. The examination of the three cases leads to the conclusion that minority rule has to be explained by examining how the identities of the minority and majority were formed, how they have been shaped throughout the history of interaction between the two groups, and how they have influenced the relationship between the groups. There is also a need to study how political entrepreneurs manipulate traditional markers and modern issues for instrumental gains. On this basis, it is possible to understand the political salience of the identities, the level of hostility and the reasons why the minorities seek political power. Attaining it or retaining it, and maintaining it for a continuous period of time is dependent on an authoritarian government structure, which includes, indispensably, considerable army involvement in politics. Persistent minority rule is also dependent on its ability to legitimize itself, primarily by creating a unified identity. Success in forming such a unified identity implies a decrease in the saliency of elements of identity that' distinguish between the groups, and ultimately a decrease in the level hostility. This allows the minority rule to persist. If, however, this "unified identity" does not have the desired outcome of mollifying the majority, the ruling minority can, and will, use its military monopoly of coercive power to subdue internal opposition. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

This study proposes and tests a comprehensive theory detailing the motivations behind political apologies. A brief survey of the literature shows a field rich in case studies but lacking in rigorous scientific analysis. The theory presented proposes a three-level examination of political apology at the state, dyadic, and system levels and incorporates the effects of culture, conflict, and the nature of the international system into analysis. This study makes use of a new dataset recording the occurrence of political apologies for interstate conflict atrocities from 1900 to 2006. The results suggest that the existing literature, while rich, does not account for all the motivating factors behind apology. The results also confirm that political apology is a creation of the modern era and a result of the liberalization of the international system. In conclusion, paths for future research are suggested and the advent of a global "age of apology" is confirmed.

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