Armed Struggle in South Africa: Consequences of a Strategy Debate
It would be possible to draw a line from the founding leaflet of Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), issued on December 16, 1961 (and from the 1962 South African Communist Party [SACP] programme, The Road to South African Freedom) to the Harare Declaration of 1989 – and to the eventual outcome and claim that the strategy of the African National Congress (ANC) was always for a negotiated settlement to achieve democracy in South Africa (Umkhonto we Sizwe 1961, 1989a, 1989b). That indeed is the idea which Allister Sparks attributes to NelsonMandela: “I startedUmkhontoWe Sizwe ... but I never had any illusions that we could win a military victory; its purpose was to focus attention on the resistancemovement” (1994:26). However, that standpoint is contradicted by the decisions of the ANC conference at Morogoro (April 25–May 1, 1969) and by countless other ANC documents which insist that the goal was the armed seizure of power by the masses.
Armed Struggle and Democracy: The Case of South Africa
The impact of the concept(s) of armed struggle for the notion(s) of democracy in South(ern) Africa is the focus of this paper. Originally submitted to a conference on '(Re-) Conceptualising Democra ...
Human Rights Obligations and Transnational Corporations: The Limits of Direct Corporate Responsibility
To date, multinational corporations have had no direct human rights obligations under international law. Nonetheless, international lawyers can no longer ignore the increasing role of non-state actors in international society. This article suggests analysing existing mechanisms and new proposals for enhancing the accountability of transnational corporations, grouped into those focusing on the responsibility of the home and host states and those centred on the imposition of direct obligations on corporations. This article will specifically draw attention to the limits of some of the suggested normative changes, from a legal-theoretical perspective and in terms of their capacity to address effectively the challenges of the lack of respect for human rights laws.