Preventing the Vacuum: Determinants of the Namibia Settlement
This paper examines the political, military and economic factors behind the diplomatic agreements which led to the withdrawal of South Africa's colonial occupation of Namibia in 1989–90, and it identifies some of the major constraints which Pretoria placed upon the independence of the new Namibian state. The view that the South African government withdrew from Namibia — but not Walvis Bay — because of military defeats in Angola during 1988 is rejected. It is argued that explanations for the settlement given by US diplomats, Chester Crocker and Charles Freeman, do not take into account key variables such as the underlying economic imperatives, South Africa's state and party building strategy in Namibia, and the political actions of the Namibian people themselves. Such determinants have also been ignored or obscured by most of the radical literature on South Africa's destabilisation of the sub‐region. It is argued here that Pretoria's attempts to consolidate stable conditions for a semi‐colonial state on it...
Geopolitical Transition and State Formation: The Changing Political Geographies of Angola, Mozambique and Namibia
Against the backdrop of decolonisation, the ending of white minority rule in southern Africa and the current restructuring of global geopolitical relations, this comparative paper evaluates the experiences of Angola, Mozambique and Namibia in forging and organising newly independent states. The principal focus is on the dialectic between official ideology and territorial (re‐)organisation, with due sensitivity to politico‐economic forces and the wider regional dynamic in each case. Analysis of these changing political geographies — the way in which space is organised and used by the state — provides important insights into processes of state formation, legitimisation and disintegration. Despite the similarities of colonial history, post‐colonial experience (including continuities of territorial organisation) and current predicaments, there have been some significant differences in the particular dynamics in Angola and Mozambique since 1975; though neither state has significantly restructured its internal ...
To Devolve or Not To Devolve? Welfare Reform in the States
This article analyzes variation in the degree to which states have responded to the devolution of welfare at the federal level by devolving authority over welfare policy to local government. I find that to the extent that states have devolved authority to lower levels of government, they tend to be states that already had a high degree of involvement of local government in welfare provision. In states without this record of local government involvement, the devolution that has occurred has not generated greater involvement of local government, but rather responsibility has been devolved to regional entities with ties to workforce development and with a substantial degree of business involvement. As states gain increasing authority over a redistributive policy, they may begin to treat it as a subset of a larger developmental policy—workforce development.