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Research Advisory Board |
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Criteria for evaluating research proposals |
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Completed projects |
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Current projects |
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Projects under development |
PROJECTS UNDER DEVELOPMENT
23. Affirmative Action: A Comparative Study
The spread of the ideas of democracy and human rights in the twentieth century has meant that the notion of a homogenous population, an idea of one-nation, one-people, has had to be replaced by the notion of a multicultural, diverse nation, and of individuals and groups who can each command their right to equal concern and respect from the government and each other. In dealing with diversity and difference, many countries have moved from the relatively passive idea of non-discrimination to a more pro-active strategy of affirmative action (AA). Variously termed in different countries, the bottom-line in all these endeavours is broadly to mandate the state to take positive measures to redress inequality.
Affirmative action measures as a strategy to achieve equality has been adopted in several demographically diverse countries. For the purpose of this project, the focus will be on AA measures in South Africa, India, Brazil and Israel and selected countries in northern Africa. The choice of jurisdictions was informed by two considerations. The first relates to the dearth of studies on affirmative action in these jurisdictions. Although affirmative action in India has been the subject of close study for some time now, the same cannot necessarily be said of South Africa, Brazil, and Israel. This alone will set the study apart from numerous other studies that have focused primarily on the experience of countries of the North. In the second place, affirmative action in the countries under review cover a range of different beneficiary groups, namely women (South Africa, India and Israel), black people (South Africa and Brazil), disadvantaged minorities based on religion and nationality (Israel), disadvantaged classes or castes (India) and disadvantaged ethnic minorities (Ethiopia, for example). This will enable the researchers to study the impact of affirmative action in very different contexts and to determine the advantages and disadvantages of using gender, race, religion, nationality, caste (or class) and ethnicity as the basis of redress measures.
Project leaders: Ockert Dupper (SU), Kamala Sankaran (U Delhi)
Invited Fellows: Sir Bob Hepple (Cambridge), Alexander Graser (Hertie School of Governance, Berlin), Ingo Sarlet (Catholic U Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre)
24. Lawmaking for Global Crisis Situations
More likely than not, the world will be facing a series of serious crises, connected to climate change, environmental disasters, natural catastrophes, shortage of all kinds of raw materials and sources of mineral energy, as well as new financial crises.To the extent they are man-made, they probably have common denominators, most importantly a short term view of those in responsible positions and conflicts of interest of the same.
If we cannot stem the tide, the consequences will be of an unprecented magnitude in terms of personal suffering and financial harm for present and future generations. The project aims to explore whether legal means can be used to avoid crises and, to the extent this would not be the case, how to cope with them. Answering the latter question requires a balancing of the very different interests of all concerned (such as “developed” and “less developed” countries as well as present and future generations). The angle will mainly be intra-disciplinary (international, national and human rights law); besides we have to borrow from the insights from countries from all over the globe.
Project leaders: Jaap Spier (Advocate-General in the Supreme Court of the Netherlands & Maastricht U), Gerhard Lubbe (SU)
Invited fellows: Ulrich Magnus (Hamburg), Cecilia Quiroga (U Chile), Bharat Desai (Jawaharlal Nehru U), Charles Okidi (U Nairobi), Douglas Cassel (Notre Dame)
25. Emerging Legal Geographies of Cultural Rights
This project explores the intensification of interest in culture as the basis for new forms of development and the assertion of new rights. Communities, NGOs, indigenous peoples and new social movement activists now assert distinctive rights and entitlements on cultural rather than economic or political grounds. Contemporary development strategies emphasize the need to tap into culture so as to develop local social capital and eliminate rural poverty. Claims to cultural property are proliferating around the world. Intellectual property is proposed to protect traditional knowledge, cultural expressions and intangible cultural heritage. What is the international legal and policy basis for these developments? How do we reconcile these claims with constitutional norms that stress equality, freedom of expression, and general access to a vibrant public domain? Are the dangers to liberal democratic norms posed by a revitalized commitment to culture as a collective right limited or contained by international human rights principles? These issues are especially relevant to South Africa but require the attention of an interdisciplinary and international team of scholars.
Project Leader: Rosemary Coombe (York University, Toronto)
26. Re-animating African Ethics, Re-imagining African Futures
A project for translating African language texts, ethical discourses and critical aesthetics in South Africa.
Since 1994, South Africans have been confronted with the task of re-legitimating and transforming the nation. However, the current juncture is no longer thinkable only in terms of nation-formation; it must also respond to the facts of globalization, including not only market liberalization and new structures of multi-polarity in the international arena, but also increasing pressures upon local cultures and forms of governance. How shall South Africa respond, in the very moment that it is attempting to consolidate national unity in a context that was historically determined by the politics of division?
This project is premised on the assumption that South African capacities for a knowing response to globalization—one that both takes advantages of its opportunities and mitigates its capacities to inflict economic and social injustice—can and must be based on a revitalization of its intellectual and critical problem-solving capacities. To do so, it must be able to draw upon indigenous intellectual traditions, including those which were forged in earlier moments of engagement with intruding structures and logics (including those of the colonial and apartheid eras). Our project aims to re-animate those traditions through a sustained survey, translation and publication of African-language literary and critical texts, and through the incubation of an informed debate about them. To achieve its aims, our project will develop a rigorously theorized translational process, and a process for establishing new, but historicized protocols of reading in order that earlier texts become available for contemporary reflection.
We wish to emphasize the ‘critical imaginative faculty’ at play in these texts—for we are seeking not merely evidence of other and historically prior normative systems, but exemplary practices for imagining a future whose contents and dimensions cannot be completely known in advance. We recognize that the transformations associated with globalization are not of the sort that terminate history, but that they are part of an unfolding and metamorphosing geopolitical complex—in which new technologies, reconfigured political alliances and centers of power, transformed economic conditions, and environmental conditions, will continue to change. What is needed then are techniques for training the imagination, forms of critique that do not revert to a politics of accusation nor to a fantasy of mastery which presumes the fixity of the world that is being subject to critique. And it is to this end that our project orients itself.
Project leaders: Rosalind C. Morris (Columbia U) and Antjie Krog (U Western Cape)
27. A Recent History of Mankind
A project that will seek to integrate archaeological, biological and physical data to enable a comprehensive understanding of human development.
Project Leader: Sydney Brenner (Cambridge)
28. A New Liberal Curriculum
Given the increasing integration of knowledge from the most diverse disciplines, can be develop a new liberal curriculum that would be the required reading for the next generation of researchers at the forefront of knowledge production?
Project Leader: Sydney Brenner (Cambridge)
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