The Redistributive State: South Africa's Post-Apartheid Policy Trajectory

Catalog description

This course evaluates post-apartheid attempts at mitigating extreme poverty and inequality by implementing a robust social welfare policy agenda geared towards redressing sociostructural ineqaualities. Apartheid, which means to keep separate in the Afrikaans language, was an organized system of racialized capitalism that structured South African social, economic, and political development between 1948-1994. Apartheid ended through a negotiated political settlement. It left in its wake the world's most unequal country. Students will take a historical approach to understand how the apartheid regime operated, unpack South Africa’s transition to democracy, and investigate post-apartheid structural concerns related to social, economic, and political justice. Students also will interrogate what the role of the state could be in providing access to social and economic justice as they analyze South Africa's constitutional commitments designed to rectify structural inequalities. The course will delve into the policy instruments designed to provide access to adequate housing, access to clean water and sanitation, and access to quality education all of which are explicitly enumerated as social rights in South Africa’s democratic constitution, then survey the outcomes of attempts to address these concerns. Students will also evaluate the economic and political ideologies which have informed stages of South Africa’s post-apartheid policy development and implementation.