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Robins, S, von Lieres, B & A, Cornwall
IDS Working Paper, Number 363
This paper draws on case study research conducted by members of the DFID-funded Citizenship Development Research Cent...
This paper draws on case study research conducted by members of the DFID-funded Citizenship Development Research Centre to explore instantiations of citizenship in different kinds of states, and to reflect what citizen engagement comes to imply in these contexts. Rather than seeking a unified definition of citizenship that covers all dimensions of human action, entitlement and belonging, we are interested in the everyday, and often highly contingent and improvisational, negotiations and performances through which people define and pursue their desires and aspirations. We suggest that an approach that explores diverse meanings and expressions of citizenship in different kinds of states can enrich our understanding of citizenship precisely because it proceeds less from normative claims or abstract ideals than from everyday encounters in particular contexts. Such an approach draws attention to the diverse ways in which particular subject-positions and forms of identification are articulated in the pursuit of concrete social and political projects. We begin by reviewing thinking on democratic citizenship in relation to the global South, and go on from there to dimensions and experiences of citizen engagement in different contexts.
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Robins, S
In VSP Coelho & B von Lieres (eds) Mobilizing for Democracy: Citizen Action and the Politics of Public Participation. London: Zed
Due to copyright restrictions, we can only share the first three pages of this chapter online. The book can be ordere...
Due to copyright restrictions, we can only share the first three pages of this chapter online. The book can be ordered from Zed Books at www.zedbooks.co.uk/citizenship or purchased at the IDS bookstore.
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Robins, S
In J Gaventa & R Tandon (eds) Globalizing Citizens: New Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion. London: Zed
Due to copyright restrictions, we can only share the first three pages of this chapter online. The book can be ordere...
Due to copyright restrictions, we can only share the first three pages of this chapter online. The book can be ordered from Zed Books at www.zedbooks.co.uk/citizenship or purchased at the IDS bookstore.
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Robins, S
IDS Working Paper 324
The paper investigates the ways in which global health messages and forms of health citizenship are mediated by AIDS ...
The paper investigates the ways in which global health messages and forms of health citizenship are mediated by AIDS activists in rural South Africa. It focuses on how international health agencies and NGOs engage with local communities through AIDS prevention and treatment programmes. Some critics regard such global health programmes as conduits for the medicalisation of social life and social problems. From this perspective global medicine is an all-encompassing process that results in systematic normalisation, depoliticisation and disempowerment of patients and citizens. However, this case study draws attention to the agency of the ëtargetsí of biomedicine. It also highlights the observation that AIDS activists and treatment literacy practitioners are not only concerned with biomedical matters, but are also committed to recruiting new members into their biopolitical projects and epistemic communities.
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Robins, S
Oxford: James Currey, with the University of Kwazulu-Natal Press.
This document is not currently available
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Robins, S, von Lieres, B & A, Cornwall
Third World Quarterly, 29(6): 1069-86.
Abstract: This paper by Steven Robins, Andrew Cornwall and Bettina von Lieres argues for an approach to researching c...
Abstract: This paper by Steven Robins, Andrew Cornwall and Bettina von Lieres argues for an approach to researching citizenship and democracy that begins not from normative convictions, but from everyday experiences in particular social, cultural and historical contexts. The authors consider the ways in which the terms ëdemocracyí and ëcitizenshipí have been used in the discourses and approaches taken within mainstream studies of citizenship and democracy, drawing attention to some of the conceptual blind spots that arise.
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Robins, S
Cape Times Readership, August
This document is not currently available
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Thompson, L, Williams, JJ, Robins, S & B, von Lieres
African Centre for Citizenship and Democracy
The aim of this monograph is to present in distilled form some of the major findings of research undertaken by a Sout...
The aim of this monograph is to present in distilled form some of the major findings of research undertaken by a South African team based at the School of Government at the University of the Western Cape from 2000 to 2005. The research was initially undertaken with an academic audience in mind, but has been rewritten to bring the policy issues to the fore for NGOs and those in the policymaking sphere of governance.
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Robins, S
American Anthropologist, 108(2): 312-23
In this article, I investigate how the moral politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa is contributing toward new...
In this article, I investigate how the moral politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa is contributing toward new forms of citizenship that are concerned with both rights-based struggles and with creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness and stigmatization of individual HIV/AIDS sufferers. I argue that it is precisely the extremity of the “near death” experiences of full-blown AIDS, and the profound stigma and “social death” associated with the later stages of the disease, that produce the conditions for HIV/AIDS survivors’ commitment to “new life” and social activism. It is the activist mediation and retelling of these traumatic experiences that facilitates HIV/AIDS activist commitment and grassroots mobilization. It is also the profound negativity of stigma and social death that animates the activist’s construction of a new positive HIV-positive identity and understanding of what it means to be a citizen–activist and member of a social movement
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Robins, S
Oxford: James Currey
Post-apartheid South Africa has been characterized by race tensions, social inequalities, and unemployment that are c...
Post-apartheid South Africa has been characterized by race tensions, social inequalities, and unemployment that are contributing to widespread crises. In addressing the transition to democracy, Limits to Liberation examines issues of culture and identity, drawing attention to the creative agency of citizens of the “new” South Africa. The writers question the classical western model of citizenship and procedural democracy in the face of the inability of most African states to provide basic needs. Their bold, interdisciplinary inquiry contributes to South African and international scholarship on urban planning, governance, and citizenship.
This document is not currently available
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Robins, S
In M Leach, I Scoones & B Wynne (eds) Science and Citizens: Globalization and the Challenge of Engagement. London: Zed.
Due to copyright restrictions, we can only share the first three pages of this chapter online.
Due to copyright restrictions, we can only share the first three pages of this chapter online.
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Robins, S
IDS Working Paper 252
This paper compares and contrasts the cultures of activism and illness and treatment experiences of UK and South Afri...
This paper compares and contrasts the cultures of activism and illness and treatment experiences of UK and South African AIDS activists. By the 1990s AIDS public health discourse in the UK, and elsewhere in the West, was reconfiguring AIDS as a manageable chronic illness that could be treated much like diabetes. By contrast, the introduction of anti-retroviral therapy (ART) in the South African public health sector in 2000 was described using quasi-religious phrases and narratives: “the Lazarus effect” and “God’s gift of life.” The paper is concerned with investigating these significant differences between Northern and Southern experiences and responses to ARV treatment. It is specifically interested in the ways in which relatively easy access to treatment in the UK has, in certain cases, contributed towards the individualisation, medicalisation and “normalisation” of HIV/AIDS. For example, some of the UK activists I interviewed claimed that the availability of ART through the NHS had “killed activism”. The paper shows how the individualising and depoliticising medicalisation processes associated with NHS treatment programmes stand in stark contrast to South Africa, where the ongoing legal and political struggles for treatment access continue to strengthen and sustain collective forms of social activism and mobilisation. The paper explores the implications of these strikingly different treatment contexts, experiences and responses. These include differences in the availability and quality of treatment and health services, infection and mortality rates, socio-economic profile of PWAs, political cultures of activism, and contrasting government and activist responses to the pandemic. In sum, individualising and normalising processes of “medicalisation” associated with the NHS are increasingly, it would seem, becoming obstacles to collectivist forms of mobilisation.
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Robins, S
The Sunday Independent, 6 March
This document is not currently available
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Robins, S
In S Askvik & N Bak (eds) Trust in Public Institutions in South Africa. Burlington, US: Ashgate
This document is not currently available
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Robins, S
IDS Working Paper 251
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Robins, S & B, von Lieres
IDS Bulletin 35(2)
This article explores the organisational practices and strategies of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an AIDS act...
This article explores the organisational practices and strategies of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an AIDS activist social movement in South Africa. TAC, like other new social movements, draws on grassroots, bottom-up, network-based modes of organisation that operate simultaneously in diverse local, national and global spaces. The article argues that TAC provides examples of organisational practices that cut across institutional and non-institutional spaces, and that are capable of generating multiple relations to the state. In doing so, it has provided its members with opportunities to engage simultaneously in a variety of participatory spaces that allow for the articulation of new forms of citizenship from below.
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Robins, S
Journal of Southern African Studies, 30(3): 651-72
This article analyses the complex cultural politics of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. It focuses on how AIDS dissident sci...
This article analyses the complex cultural politics of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. It focuses on how AIDS dissident science impacted on policy discourses and how AIDS activists, together with scientists, the media and health professionals, responded. It also shows how the HIV/AIDS debate and struggles over access to treatment were framed by historically embedded cultural and political interpretations of AIDS that were a product of South Africas apartheid and post-apartheid history. However, rather than adopting a cultural nationalist response to this historical legacy, activists from the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) deployed a class-based politics that concentrated on access to anti-retroviral drugs rather than debates on the complexities of AIDS causation. This approach contrasts with attempts by AIDS activists in the United States to influence the production of scientific knowledge on AIDS directly, for example, research funding and protocols for trials. The article discusses how TAC and its partner organisation, Medicins Sans FrontiËres (MSF - Doctors without Borders), strategically positioned themselves in the struggle for access to AIDS drugs, and how new forms of health citizenship, gendered identities and political subjectivities emerged in the course of these struggles. For example, ideas of bodily autonomy associated with liberal individualist conceptions of citizenship collided with patriarchal cultural ideas and practices that prevent many women from accessing biomedical interventions (for example, contraception, HIV testing and treatment). The biomedical paradigm that underpinned TAC/ MSF campaigns also had to contend with local understandings of misfortune and illness. While TACs strategies included networking with global civil society organisations such as MSF, Health Gap, and Oxfam, they also involved grassroots mobilisation and an engagement with local socio-cultural realities. This brand of health activism produced solidarities that straddled local, national and global spaces, resembling what Arjun Appadurai and others describe as globalisation from below.
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Robins, S
The Sunday Independent
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Robins, S
The Sunday Independent, December
This document is not currently available
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Robins, S
The Sunday Independent, March
This document is not currently available
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Robins, S
In J Ossenbrugge & C Haferburg (eds) Ambiguous Restructurings of Post-apartheid Cape Town: The Spatial Form of Socio-Political Change. Germany: Lit Verlag
This document is not currently available
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Robins, S & B, von Lieres
UWC Working Paper, No. 4, Citizenship, Participation and Accountability series
This paper focuses on new communities and conceptions of citizenship and civic action promoted by two globally connec...
This paper focuses on new communities and conceptions of citizenship and civic action promoted by two globally connected Cape Town-based NGOs and CBOs involved in struggles over access to land, housing and Aids treatment. The organisations discussed in the paper include the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an Aids activist group, and the South African Homeless People’s Federation (SAHPF), a low-income housing association connected to networks of Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a globally connected organisation based in 14 countries and including cities such as Bombay, Calcutta, Nairobi, Bangkok, Karachi and Bogota. The TAC is connected to groups such as Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders – MSF), Oxfam, Ralph Nader’s Consumer Technology Project, and a range of other international activist organisations. Like the TAC, the SAHPF is a mostly women’s organisation that is involved in
a wide range of activities including savings clubs, income generation projects, community policing, Aids intervention and so on. The Mumbai-based women’s savings collectives and the SAHPF are part of SDI’s global network of homeless people’s organisations that is connected through Federation members visiting each other’s cities. This form of ‘horizontal exchange’ assists poor people exchange ideas through direct learning about savings schemes, housing, income generation projects and so on.
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Robins, S
In Hohmann, T (ed) The San and the State: Contesting Land, Development, Identity and Representation. Koln: Rudiger Koppe Verlag
This document is not currently available
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Robins, S
In Third World Quarterly, 23 (4): 665-689
ABSTRACT Urban studies scholars drawing on Foucault’s analysis of governmentality have investigated how urban social ...
ABSTRACT Urban studies scholars drawing on Foucault’s analysis of governmentality have investigated how urban social orders are increasingly more concerned with the management of space rather than on the discipline of offenders or the punishment of offences (Merry, 2001). This paper examines the ‘rationality ’ and efficacy of spatial governmentality in post-aparthei d Cape Town, and shows how the city has increasingly become a ‘fortress city’ (Davis, 1990), much like cities such as Los Angeles, Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. These ‘global cities’ are increasingly characterised by privatised security systems in middle class suburbs, shopping malls and gated communities (Caldeira, 1999).
These spatial forms of governmentality draw on sophisticated security systems comprising razor wire and electrified walls, burglar alarms and safe rooms, as well as vicious guard dogs, neighbourhood watches, private security companies, and automated surveillance cameras. On the other side of the race and class divide are urban ghettoes characterised by growing poverty and everyday violence. These socio-spati al inequalities continue to be reproduced despite urban planning initiatives aimed at desegregating the apartheid city. Although the media and the middle classes highlight the dangers of crime and violence, they tend to ignore the structures of inequality that fuel the growth of crime syndicates and violent drug economies that are reproducing these urban governance crises. Given the diminished resources of the neo-liberal state, the policing of middle class residential and business districts is increasingly being ‘outsourced’ to private security companies. In working class neighbourhoods of Cape Town such as Manenberg, the state has attempted to re-establish governance by resorting to new forms of spatial governmentality. The paper draws attention to the limits of these attempts to assert state control through the management of space. Spatial governance in places like Manenberg will continue to be relatively ineffectual given existing levels of social inequality and racial
polarization. Such processes are reproduced by massive unemployment and racialised poverty resulting from socio-spatial legacies of apartheid and Cape Town’s shift from a manufacturing to a tourist, IT and financial services economy. Although this paper focuses on attempts at re-establishing governance in a crime and gangster-ridden working class neighbourhood of Cape Town, it addresses these issues in relation to city-wide shifts to new forms of spatial
governmentality after apartheid.
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Robins, S
In The Sunday Independent July 7 2002
This document is not currently available
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Robins, S
The Sunday Independent December 2001
A well established body of democratic theory suggests that associations are the schools of democracy and, because the...
A well established body of democratic theory suggests that associations are the schools of democracy and, because they produce civic and active citizens,are vital to the quality of democracy. In this paper, we find that this may not be the case in new democracies with authoritarian legacies.
This document is not currently available
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Robins, S
Journal of Southern African Studies, 27(4): 833-853
This article focuses on the ambiguities and contradictions of donor and NGO development discourses in relation to loc...
This article focuses on the ambiguities and contradictions of donor and NGO development discourses in relation to local construction of community, cultural authenticity and San identity. It deals specifically with the cultural politics of the successful 1999 khomani San land claim in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. The study investigates local responses to state, NGO and donor discourses on indigenous identity and cultural survival. It shows how strategic narratives of community solidarity, social cohesion and cultural community were produced by claimants and their lawyers during this process. In the post-settlement period, however, social fragmentation and intra-community conflict between traditionalists and western bushmen became increasingly evident. These conflicts drew attention to the difficulties of creating community solidarity and viable livelihood strategies in a province characterised by massive unemployment and rural poverty. The paper suggests that these divisions were also a product of the contradictory objectives of NGOs and donors to provide support for traditional leadership, San language and cultural survival and to inculcate modern/western ideas and democratic practices. Furthermore, despite the thoroughly hybridised character of contemporary San identity, knowledge and practices, San traditionalists appeared to stabilise bushmen identity by recourse to notions of a detribalised Other - the western bushmen living in their midst. It is evident, however, that the traditionalist versus western bushmen dichotomy is itself at the heart of donor and NGO development agendas. Consequently, the donor double vision of the San - as both First Peoples and modern citizens-in-the-making - contributed to these intra-community divisions and conflict.
