The African National Congress centenary: a long and difficult journey

The African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa was formed under difficult conditions, facing a Union government bent on extending racist laws and an unsympathetic British government to whom repeated petitions were addressed without success. By the 1930s petitioning had run its course and the organization collapsed. In the 1940s, however, structures were established which laid the basis for mass activities in the following decade. In the 1950s a range of campaigns of resistance gave rise to a large ANC constituency. It also elaborated an alternative democratic vision through adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955, after a process of lengthy consultation. The document became a rallying point for a range of democratic organizations. After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 the ANC was banned, but continued to operate illegally. It embarked on short‐lived armed activities, leading to the arrest and exile of its leading figures. The years that followed saw further setbacks as the organization sought to establish itself outside, and in small underground units inside, the country. After the Soweto uprising of 1976, many young people joined the ANC's armed wing and carried out attacks on apartheid installations. Significantly, this period also saw the revival of mass public political activities on an unprecedented scale. A combination of internal and external pressures against apartheid paved the way for negotiations, resulting in democratic elections in 1994. The ANC now governs, having fundamentally, albeit unevenly, transformed the lives of many—but continued poverty, unemployment, extensive corruption and criminality risk leading to a deep systemic crisis affecting governance as a whole.     

Syria: from ‘authoritarian upgrading’ to revolution?

Syria was, until recently, seen as a ‘successful’ example of authoritarian ‘upgrading’ or ‘modernization;’ yet in 2011 the Syrian regime faced revolution from below: what went wrong? Bashar al‐Asad inherited a flawed regime yet managed to start the integration of his country into the world capitalist market, without forfeiting the nationalist card by, for instance, attempting to acquire legitimacy from opposition to Israel and the US invasion of Iraq. Yet, despite his expectations and that of most analysts, his regime proved susceptible to the Arab uprising. This article examines the causes and development of the Syrian uprising of 2011. It contextualizes the revolt by showing how the construction of the regime built in vulnerabilities requiring constant ‘upgradings’ that produced a more durable regime but had long term costs. It focuses on Bashar al‐Asad's struggles to ‘modernize’ authoritarianism by consolidating his own ‘reformist’ faction, balancing between the regime's nationalist legitimacy and its need for incorporation into the world economy; his shifting of the regime's social base to a new class of crony capitalists; and his effort to manage participatory pressures through limited liberalization and ‘divide and rule’. The seeds of the uprising are located in these changes, notably the abandonment of the regime's rural constituency and debilitating of its institutions. Yet, it was Asad's inadequate response to legitimate grievances and excessive repression that turned demands for reform into attempted revolution. The article then analyses the uprising, looking at the contrary social bases and strategies of regime and opposition, and the dynamics by which violence and foreign intervention have escalated, before finishing with comments on the likely prognosis.