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  • Southern Africa in World Politics: Local Aspirations and Global Entanglements
  • Sara Rich Dorman
Janice Love . Southern Africa in World Politics: Local Aspirations and Global Entanglements. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2005. xx + 235 pp. Tables. Figures. Maps. Boxes. Notes. Index. $24.00. Paper.

Analyzing the impact of globalization in southern Africa, Janice Love provides a thoughtfully written text that surveys both a large geographical area and a substantial time period. For the most part this is done successfully, although at times the emphasis on thematic issues leads to some very odd leaps in time and focus. Love has an appealingly discursive writing style; the content, however, seems chosen for an audience with little background knowledge, providing more generalizations than new insights, few references, and little engagement with current academic thought, arguments, or debates. Probably a good way to get new students interested in the issues, but not satisfying or challenging enough for those at a more advanced level.

The book begins with an overview of theories of globalization and localization, followed by chapters on military, political, and economic globalization. The discussion of military globalization focuses mainly on the Cold War and its interaction with national liberation struggles. Although the account is more than adequate, I have always found it problematic to teach this period without comparative reference to other regions—the Horn and/or Western Sahara, for example, which saw quite different trajectories. The chapter on economic globalization provides a fairly contemporary [End Page 224] discussion of the region's political economy, with a now-standard emphasis on trade, liberalization, debt, and development. In contrast, the chapter on political globalization links together a diverse series of interventions: SADCC, peacekeeping, the TRC, and transnational advocacy campaigns (the Campaign to Ban Land-Mines and the Sant'Egidio community). This latter material is by far the most creative and thought-provoking in the book.

Significant mainly for its absence is cultural globalization. While the introductory chapter on globalization does include a subsection on the topic, it focuses on "political" culture: nationalism, socialism, passive resistance, and the like. There is no discussion of missionary intervention; changes to material culture, consumerism, and advertising; science, environmentalism, and agricultural technology; media, literature, and sport; migration and diaspora communities; or the significant religious trends of Pentecostalism and Islam. There is thus no substantive examination of the introduction of new staple foods, export crops, and modes of farming, all of which continue to shape technical interventions in the region, and only a very limited account of the impact of such shifts on gender and family relations.

The downplaying of religious changes in particular is disappointing because they link southern Africa into South-South patterns of globalization (Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East), in addition to the North-South dynamic. The Evangelical and Pentecostal churches have also been significant in that they "export" personnel and ideas within the region and to the North. Love makes the point that Gandhi's ideas of passive resistance are a South African export to the world (54), but she seems less interested in these contemporary equivalents. Given her academic engagement in this area (although formerly in international relations, Love currently teaches in a religious studies department), this omission is baffling and disappointing.

As a consequence, only part of the story of globalization in southern Africa is told, emphasizing formal institutions and the impact of force and power. Indeed, the text sets up a distinction between "old" globalization, which is primarily coercive (imperialism), and "new" globalization, which is "cooperative, competitive or forceful" (20). This downplays the extent to which even imperial and settler power was buttressed, through processes of inculturation and indigenization, by the transfer of norms and values that have proven remarkably resilient and powerful. It also seems to side-step the impact of "modernity" in southern Africa and the complex ways in which modernity and tradition continue to interact and influence the region's development.

Sara Rich Dorman
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, Scotland
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