Keith Gottschalk – författare

This book will be of interest to all Namibians and South Africans, especially historians, political scientists, sociologists, and social anthropologists. International relations scholars will also be interested in how Smuts persuaded Wilson to create for the future League of Nations a third-class mandate, a "C class" mandate, which was gutted of all effective safeguards to defend the indigenes of the mandate from a predatory mandatory power. This mandated territory was developed as a settler colony regardless of the clash of interests this created against the indigenes.This applied especially to land expropriation on behalf of the settlers, confirming the German seizure of land, which the mandatory system was supposed to remedy. This book draws on unpublished archival records, as well as a close reading of official publications, to analyse an agrarian counter-revolution, and the allocation of minerals and fishing rights for a system of political patronage amongst the rulers. It is a must purchase for every scholarly library.

The African Union’s Africa: New Pan-African Initiatives in Global Governance examines the initiatives of the Pan-African global governance institution the African Union (AU) as the organization and its precursor commemorate their Jubilee as international actors. Taking a unique approach, the book seeks to explain the AU through a theoretical framework referred to as “the African Union phenomenon,” capturing the international organization’s efforts to transform the national politics of Africa as well as to globalize the practice of African politics. The authors examine Africa’s self-determined international norms and values such as Pan-Africanism, African Solutions to African Problems, Hybrid Democracy, Pax Africana, and the African Economic Community to demonstrate that Africa—the world’s least developed region—is composed of crucial values, institutions, agents, actors, and forces that are, through the AU, contributing to the advancement of contemporary global development. The book reveals how in the areas of cultural identity, democracy, security, and economic development Africans are infusing new politics, economics, and cultures into globalization representing the collective will and imprint of African agency, decisions, ideas, identities, practices, and contexts. Via a Pan-African vision, the AU is having both regional and global impact, generating exciting possibilities and complicated challenges.