Patrick Bond
Biographic Data
| ID | 129126 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patrick Bond |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patrick |
| FAMILY NAME | Bond |
| SIGNATURE | BOND P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of KwaZulu-Natal |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6657-7898 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 133 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 541 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 132 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Fusions and Frictions in G20 Climate Policy
Global climate policy requires constant attention due to shifting interests and alliances between national negotiators. Whether represented at global or national scales, three universal features of fused climate policy conjoin the wealthy and emerging G20 economies that are historically responsible for the most greenhouse gas emissions. The former are represented by G7 Western powers—the United States, Europe, United Kingdom, Japan, and Canada—an…
‘We’ve got the state. Where’s the power?’: Debilitating contradictions in the South African Communist Party’s state leadership since 1994
The South African Communist Party’s potential to play a progressive role within post-apartheid state leadership was frequently tested – and found wanting – following liberation in 1994. The failure was in not advancing the National Democratic Revolution’s ‘second-stage’ objectives, that is, ending not just racial injustice in civil and political terms (the first stage), but socioeconomic injustice. Several Communist cabinet members shaped transit…
The double movements of port cities: Top-down expansion, bottom-up resistance in Durban and Valencia
Port cities stand at the center of the contradictions of supply-chain capitalism, where large-scale logistical expansion collides with social, economic, and environmental priorities on the ground. Drawing on critical logistics scholarship and ethnographic research, the article conceptualizes port infrastructure as a site of Polanyian double movement: while enabling the expansion of global circulation, it simultaneously provokes counter-movements,…
Pitfalls of resource-national consciousness: Mineral depletion, pollution, emissions and social reproduction blind spots
Frantz Fanon warned of various ‘pitfalls of national consciousness’ associated with the shift to post-colonialism, appropriate also for a more recent shift, from resource looting to resource nationalism. Depletion of Africa’s non-renewable mining wealth and the pollution-riddled extraction and combustion of oil, gas and coal – under either the neocolonial or the resource-nationalist agendas – are not economically justifiable , especially when oth…
From Françafrique to Chinafrica? Ecologically unequal exchange, neocolonialism, and environmental conflicts in Africa
Más allá del multipolarismo imperial/subimperial
The ‘multipolar’ project appears to some as an alternative to western-dominated imperialist power, especially to the corporate-oriented multilateral institutions. However, even if inroads are made by middle-income countries into formal share ownership and management of these institutions, it is evident that their successful assimilation of neoliberals from the Global South represents an untenable imperial/sub-imperial partnership. After all, the …
Diversionary Post-Coal Politics in South Africa: A Chinese Solar-Powered Industrial Zone Controversy
In September 2021 at a United Nations climate summit in New York, Xi Jinping announced that there would be no further Chinese coal-fired power plants along the Belt and Road Initiative, which stretches as far as South Africa. Instead, the Chinese operator of South Africa's single largest Special Economic Zone proposal - in rural Makhado - and his local allies suggested that solar power could supply energy for the $10 billion project, including hi…
Growing Divides between Establishment and Climate Justice Proponents: A View from the Extremes of South Africa
The failure of elites negotiating global public goods – e.g., ending COVID -19 “vaccine apartheid,” forging geopolitical stability, reducing inequality, regulating international financial flows, and avoiding world recession – is nowhere more dangerous than the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s refusal to cut greenhouse gas emissions deeply and fairly. “Climate Justice” principles are ignored, so divisions grow between what r…
Elite summits amplify Africa’s climate catastrophes
Prior to the 2023 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference (hosted in Dubai) there were summits of global, so-called 'multipolar' and continental-African elites. An assessment offers the basis for pessimism about low-income African communities' ability to withstand further extreme weather events. In the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa bloc, as well as in African Union, G20 and United Nations summiting in recent mont…
Nothing has changed, South Africa’s sub-imperialist role has been reinforced: Samir Amin’s durable critique of apartheid/post-apartheid political economy
Samir Amin's critiques of both apartheid-era and post-apartheid political economy contributed to his scathing view of the crucial 'semi-peripheral' layer of the world system, a perspective typically ignored in binary formulations of Global North and Global South. Amin's 1977 article 'The future of South Africa' was among his first statements of how, using that era's dependency theory language, 'South African capital requires an outward policy of …
Leaning on the BRICS as a Geopolitical Counterweight Leads Only to Faux-Polyarchic, Subimperial “Spalling”
A global theory of uneven development, for which the world-systems perspective is a vital geopolitical accompaniment, contributes to an explanation of the current global geopolitical chaos, so well expressed by Joe Biden in his 2020 Foreign Affairs lament: "the international system that the United States so carefully constructed is coming apart at the seams." Biden aimed to consign to history his predecessor Donald Trump's "paleoconservative" nat…
Climate, violence, resource extraction and ecological debt: Global implications of an assassination on South Africa's coal mining belt
Extractivism has attracted inspiring resistance in South Africa, but far-reaching lessons from one site of struggle in KwaZulu-Natal Province are sobering. The October 2020 assassination of Fikile Ntshangase, an anti-coal activist, reflects difficult political-economic and political-ecological terrain. The critical role of gendered activism in former apartheid-era Bantustans underlay concrete problems Ntshangase faced when confronted by male coal…
The Case for Ecosocialism in the Face of the Worsening Climate Crisis
A fierce intellectual battle continues over the ideological character of green politics. The overall conflict that emerged in past decades between environmental justice advocates on the one hand, and on the other, a coalition of states, corporations and their academic, NGO and media allies will now revive in earnest, given the Biden Administration's January 2021 pledge to take climate change seriously. After the Trump regime's climate denialism, …
L’impérialisme fossile français, le sous-impérialisme sud-africain et la résistance anti-impériale
Les opérations actuelles que mène Total en Afrique suivent un schéma ancien : l’exploitation, tournée vers les énergies fossiles, et la corruption des économies, des gouvernements, des sociétés et des environnements des pays en développement, le tout soutenu par la puissance étatique française. Emmanuel Macron rendit la chose tout à fait manifeste en 2021, lorsqu’il insista pour défendre le gaz possédé par Total au Mozambique (20 milliards de dol…
A Soberania Sul-Africana em Questão: Crises Econômicas, Ecológicas, Subimperialismo e Resistências Sociais
O desenvolvimento da economia política contemporânea da África do Sul ocorreu no contexto de uma ordem capitalista global caracterizada por relações políticas e econômicas cada vez mais desiguais entre e dentro dos países. Antes da libertação em 1994, muitas pessoas em todo o mundo apoiavam ativamente a luta contra o apartheid. Se o Estado do apartheid foi derrotado, manteve força suficiente para limitar uma transição radical. Desde 1994, a dimin…
Africa’s pioneering Marxist political economist, seen from South Africa – Samir Amin, 1931-2018
Capitalist crisis and uneven development applied in Southern Africa
Some of the most decisive moments in the neoliberal era were implanted first as major changes to the United States and world financial system during the early 1980s. As an inside observer at the Federal Reserve briefly during the time, learning a bourgeois mode of economic theory and description—especially applied to the global recession, financial failures, and worsening inequality of that era—was unsatisfying. The ideological and applied power …
The State of the Continent is Good’: African ‘Foreigners’ and Foreign Direct Investment, Seen from Subimperial South Africa
African elites’ perpetual hope for export-led growth based on primary commodity extraction continues to suffer from harsh economic, political and now also climatic and public-health realities. Among the contradictions, COVID-19’s economic lockdown amplified two of the most difficult aspects of South Africa’s regional and inter-ethnic relations: increased working-class desperation as township economies suffered the most from the pandemic, and the …
South Africa’s Shrinking Sovereignty: Economic Crises, Ecological Damage, Sub-Imperialism and Social Resistances
The development of contemporary South Africa political economy occurred within the context of a global capitalist order characterized by increasingly unequal political and economic relations between and within countries. Before liberation in 1994, many people across the world actively supported the struggle against apartheid, with South Africa’s neighbouring states paying the highest price. The ‘sovereignty’ of the apartheid state was challenged …
La justice climatique sud-africaine face à l'économie fossile
Critique du rôle subimpérial que l'Afrique du Sud joue dans la partie australe du continent 1 , l'auteur montre l'effroyable politique énergétique et extractiviste que l'État et les grandes entreprises internationales mènent dans la région. Parallèle à celle du Brésil, la courbe ascendante d'émission de CO2 de l'Afrique du Sud à croisé en 2003 celle de la France et la même courbe par habitant vient de dépasser celle de l'Allemagne. Dans des condi…
Truncated 21st-century trajectories of progressive international solidarity
What potentials exist for realizing a new internationalism consistent with the visions of Samir Amin, Africa’s greatest political economist and one of the leading Marxists of his generation? To answer requires tracing back several decades, to interpret Amin’s own strategy for establishing first, continental and then, global networks mixing radical scholars and activists. Many missteps were taken, among which were gaps between top-down intellectua…
Contradictory time horizons of Durban energy piping in an era of looming climate chaos
The contradictory role of time in urban capital’s uneven development can be observed through the analytical lens of infrastructure investment. The two cases considered below are energy pipelines in Durban, South Africa. On the one hand, urgency is associated with greenhouse-gas emissions mitigation, to slow climate change that is already doing enormous damage in this city. Yet on the other hand, the lengthy payback of mega-project investments mad…
Truncated 21st-Century Trajectories of Progressive International Solidarity
Patrick Bond provides a biography of Amin’s work as a global political thinker and leader on the left. From his early days building the Third World Forum and establishing “origins of a South-centric organic intelligentsia with global visions” to his work with the World Social Forum process, Amin dedicated his life to trying to lay the foundations for a Fifth International. Bond notes Amin’s frustration with the extreme fragmentation and limited p…
Deracialized Nostalgia, reracialized community, and truncated gentrification: Capital and cultural flows in Richmond, Virginia and Durban, South Africa
Gentrification literature often focuses on frictions between gentrifiers (often white) and those being displaced by the process (often low-income people of color). Far less attention is paid to a revealing place-marketing strategy that papers over race politics. Businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods appeal to their customers’ sense of nostalgia for a vanished way of life, while eliding racial injustices prevalent in the times they evoke. The pr…
Speculators and Scoundrels in South Africa's Secondary Circuit of Capital: A Turbulent Investment Climate at Durban's Point Waterfront
the urban waterfront has become a new frontier of the city with opportunities for significant aesthetic, economic, social and environmental benefits; it is also the new battleground over conflict
Debt, Uneven Development and Capitalist Crisis in South Africa: From Moody's macroeconomic monitoring to Marikana microfinancemashonisas
The power, vulnerability and destructiveness of financial markets are out of control in South Africa, now among the most unequal, economically volatile and protest-intensive countries worldwide. While debt made itself felt in many sites, of interest in both criticising and promoting solutions is the 'scale jumping' required from South Africa's national insertion into the world financial system, entailing the Reserve Bank setting very high interes…
Not So Natural an Alliance? Degrowth and Environmental Justice Movements in the Global South
Both environmental justice (EJ) and degrowth movements warn against increasing the physical size of the economy. They both oppose extractivism and debt-fuelled economies, as well as the untrammelled profit motive which fails to incorporate full environmental and social costs. They both rely upon social movements that have led scholarship in its activities and achievements, in part through challenging power structures. Therefore, some argue the ex…
Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment
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Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal: Essays on South Africa's New Urban Crisis
The Politics of Discontent and Social Protest in Durban
Social protests in South Africa are frequent, contributing to an average of more than 8000 'Gatherings Act' incidents per year recently, according to the South African Police Service. This paper is focused on discontent and social protest in Durban in 2009–2012, considering emerging trends and tactics within current understandings of social protest in South Africa. It relies mainly on mainstream media articles such as those archived in the Centre…
Water commodification and decommodification narratives: Pricing and policy debates from Johannesburg to Kyoto to Cancun and back
The Economist magazine's influential mid-2003 survey on water declared the central dilemma: “Throughout history, and especially over the past century, [water] has been ill-governed and, above all
Movements, protests and a massacre in South Africa
The Marikana Massacre of August 2012 exposed the most unstable configuration of forces in post-apartheid South Africa, forged through entrenched social and economic inequalities, ecological degradation, indebtedness and corruption. Dissent against prevailing power relations had arisen over many years, with impoverished communities registering thousands of ‘service delivery protests’, seemingly without either resolution or maturation into durable …
Emissions Trading, New Enclosures and Eco‐Social Contestation
The central operating strategy within the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and most of the advanced capitalist world's environmental policy is to address climate change through the market mechanism known as emissions trading. Based upon government issuance and private trading of emissions reductions credits and offsets, this approach quickly rose to $135 billion in annual trading. But in the wake of the collapse of climate negotiations in Copenhagen and a wor…
From Racial to Class Apartheid: South Africa's Frustrating Decade of Freedom
The end of the apartheid regime was a great human achievement. Yet the 1994 election of an African National Congress (ANC) majority—with Nelson Mandela as the new president—did not alter the enormous structural gap in wealth between the majority black and minority white populations. Indeed, it set in motion neoliberal policies that exacerbated class, race, and gender inequality. To promote a peaceful transition, the agreement negotiated between t…
Xenophobia and Civil Society: Durban's Structured Social Divisions
Xenophobia in Durban was of a lower intensity than in South Africa's other two main metropolises, Johannesburg and Cape Town, in the 2008–10 period, and yet was just as durable, with incidents continuing to reflect underlying social antagonism. The roots of the conflict are, we argue, to be found in the material processes of 'uneven and combined development' that are too rarely tackled in the public or policy spheres. These processes have been di…
Basic infrastructure for socio-economic development, environmental protection and geographical desegregation: South Africa's unmet challenge
Global Governance Campaigning and mdg s: From top-down to bottom-up anti-poverty work
What should be the foundational campaigning demands for those attempting to eradicate Third World poverty? The Millennium Development Goals are popular, serving in 2005 to motivate the British Make Poverty History movement, the Live8 consciousness-raising rock concerts and the Johannesburg-based Global Call to Action Against Poverty. Yet, upon closer inspection, the implementation processes associated with the mdgs have serious weaknesses. They w…
BRICS banking and the debate over sub-imperialism
Funded at $100 billion each, the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) and New Development Bank (NDB) represent ‘sub-imperial’ finance, insofar as, by all indications, they fit into – instead of providing alternatives to – the prevailing world systems of sovereign debt and project credits. Balance of payments constraints for BRICS members will not be relieved by the CRA, which requires an IMF intervention after just 30% of the quota is borro…
Uncomfortable Collaborations’: Contesting Constructions of the ‘Poor’ in South Africa
This article deconstructs the problematic way the ‘Poor’ are represented by the intellectual ‘Left’ as a fixed, virtuous subject. Even while this fixed identity is actively mobilised by people themselves to gain symbolic and real power, I argue that the philosopher's fixation on the singular subjectivity of the oppressed confines the ‘Poor’ to their very subjugation. Instead, I propose a more nuanced understanding of how agency and oppression occ…
Economic growth, ecological modernization or environmental justice? Conflicting discourses in post-apartheid South Africa∗
Sub-imperialism as Lubricant of Neoliberalism: South African ‘deputy sheriff’ duty within brics
South Africa’s role in global economy and geopolitics was, during the apartheid era, explicitly sub-imperialist, as the West’s ‘deputy sheriff’ in a tough neighbourhood But, with democracy in 1994, there arose a debate surrounding the difference between the liberation government’s (leftist) foreign policy rhetoric and its practice. Defining the sub-imperial standpoint at this stage is important in because of the extreme economic, social and envir…
Climate Justice Politics across Space and Scale
After roughly two decades of growing activist interest in the climate problem, the deadlocked politics of formal climate change negotiations generated such divisions that a formal global network of radical proponents of ‘climate justice’ emerged. In December 2007, Climate Justice Now! was formed to transcend earlier technicist, market-oriented, insider strategies by environmental NGOs. South Africa is one place where climate justice politics refl…
Maintaining Momentum after Copenhagen's Collapse: Seal the Deal or "Seattle" the Deal
The Copenhagen Accord that U.S. President Barack Obama persuaded leaders of the BASIC countries—Brazil, South Africa, India and China—to sign at literally the climate summit's last minute on Decemb
The State of the Global Carbon Trade Debate
I can't understand why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.”—Al Gore speaking privately, August 20072 2Nicholas Kri
Globalisation/Commodification or Deglobalisation/Decommodification in Urban South Africa
The main trends in contemporary South African urban policy were set before the end of apartheid, when market logic was adopted with the assistance of the World Bank. Once in power, the African National Congress amplified this logic in several crucial respects, as witnessed in the 1994 housing and 1998 municipal government policies. Those policies failed to address long-standing deficiencies in housing finance, services provision, land distributio…
The ANC's ‘Left Turn’ & South African sub-imperialism
The South African government is widely considered to play a progressive role in Africa and the world. Indeed, there was an expectation after the 2004 election that Pretoria would be part of a global backlash against neoliberalism. However, the radical rhetoric often emanating from Pretoria these days barely disguises its post-apartheid record of promoting of strategies which promote global integration. These include the New Partnership for Africa…
Uneven Development and Scale Politics in Southern Africa: What We Learn from Neil Smith
Southern Africa is probably the most unevenly developed region on earth, combining the most modern technologies and an advanced working class with the world's extremes of inequality and social militancy. The two most extreme countries, both with settler–colonial populations and accumulation processes that created durable class/race/gender distortions and extreme environmental degradation, are South Africa and Zimbabwe—both of which Neil Smith vis…
Learning from postneoliberalisms
This forum examines a range of grounded struggles over efforts to materialize elements of a ‘postneoliberal’ agenda by social and political movements of the 2000s. Drawing from their research in Latin America and South Africa, the contributors ask when, where and why these experiments in realizing postneoliberalisms have prompted durable transformations in neoliberal political economic structures and social rationalities (or not). Theorizing from…
Carbon Capital's Trial, the Kyoto Protocol's Demise, and Openings for Climate Justice
This volume is devoted to exploring two interlocking, overlapping scales of political ecology: local eco-social conditions and environmental justice campaigning in Durban, South Africa and climate
Competing Explanations of Zimbabwe's Long Economic Crisis
For further references to these themes, see Note 1. When did Zimbabwe's apparently endless economic downturn actually begin? February 2000, when Robert Mugabe began authorizing land invasions? Nove
Township housing and South Africa’s ‘financial explosion’: The theory and practice of financial capital in Alexandra
The student loan crisis in the US: Proposed Solutions 'Blame the Victims
The new US class struggle: Financial Industry Power vs. Grassroots Populism
In a complementary article to Cleaver's discussion of the debt crisis in Capital & Class 39, Bond considers the explosive growth of debt in us finance and the populist campaigns ranged against this new financial power. Bond suggests that the bases of new local, national and international coalitions to refuse the imposition of the costs of devaluation onto exploited groups can be seen in these campaigns
Geopolitics, International Finance and National Capital Accumulation: Zimbabwe in the 1980s and 1990s
Re-using the spaces of confinement: From urban apartheid to post-apartheid without postmodernism
World Bank financing for urban development: Issues and options for South Africa Pressentation to the Joint Technical Committee, Central Witwatersrand Metropolitan Chamber 16 July 1992
Economic Origins of Black Townships in Zimbabwe: Contradictions of Industrial and Financial Capital in the 1950s and 1960s
Patrick Bond, Economic Origins of Black Townships in Zimbabwe: Contradictions of Industrial and Financial Capital in the 1950s and 1960s, Economic Geography, Vol. 69, No. 1, African Development (Jan., 1993), pp. 72-89
Response to government's draft urban development strategy document
Toward the Integration of Urban Social Movements at the World Scale: "Dialogue with W. Warren Wagar' s"Toward a Praxis of World Integration
Wagar is correct to heap scorn on the notion that "any movement in any degree of opposition to the capitalist world-system and/or its colluding dominant national states is somehow, almost mystically, a comrade-movement of all the others. The great question is whether antisystemic movements are really antisystemic." That is indeed a great question, which we want to address forthrightly by describing ways the urban component of South Africa's semi-…
The failure of housing policy in post-apartheid South Africa
Privatisation, participation and protest in the restructuring of municipal services: Grounds for opposing World Bank promotion of ‘public-private partnerships’
Local economic development and the municipal services crisis in post-apartheid South Africa: The Case of Stutterheim
Political Reawakening in Zimbabwe
In Zimbabwe, is a post-nationalist politics propelled by progressive currents finally on the horizon? Has fatigue associated with the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union's (ZANU's) malgovernance and economic mistakes finally reached a breaking point? If so, do these developments reflect a general dynamic in the broader social struggle against the globalized, neoliberal form international capitalism now takes? Will a new labor party emerge as t…
Basic infrastructure for socio-economic development, environmental protection and geographical desegregation: South Africa's unmet challenge
Global Economic Crisis: A View From South Africa
Any analysis of the erratic unfolding of global economic crisis is bound to be hotly contested. This is particularly so in mid-1999, amid claims from Washington that the past two years' dangers of financial meltdown and deflation were averted and finally extinguished through a combination of policy measures and good fortune: slightly looser Federal Reserve monetary policy adopted in September 1998, in the immediate wake of the successful public-p…
Cities of Gold, Townships of Coal: Essays on South Africa's New Urban Crisis
Defunding the Fund, Running on the Bank
Two ordinarily impenetrable financial institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank—have finally come into focus for activists, in a way that sharpens what are often fuzzy discussions surrounding globalization and popular resistance. Around thirty thousand protesters joined the Mobilization for Global Justice in Washington, DC, on April 16, 2000, capping a week that began ominously. It started with a chilly and poorly attended…
Regionalism, environment and Southern African class struggles∗
Economic growth, ecological modernization or environmental justice? Conflicting discourses in post-apartheid South Africa∗
Radical Rhetoric and the Working Class During Zimbabwean Nationalisms Dying Days
Introduction: african nationalism in decline.Startling arguments have been made by radical scholars that the nation-state is no longer an appropriate site for contestation of formal power, on behalf of social progress, by the multitudes. 2 Perhaps most extreme is the stance of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000: 305), in Empire
South Africa's agenda in 21stcentury global governance
Can Thabo Mbeki change the world? It's a fair question. 'We will succeed', implored Mbeki to a captivated San Francisco audience in May 2000, 'in the struggle to end poverty and underdevelopment in our country and continent, provided we can count on the kind of support you gave us as we fought together to end the system of apartheid' (Mbeki, 2000). Thus the South African president invited leading representatives of US business, who in reality had…
Pretoria's perspective on globalization: A critique
Explicitly disempowering rhetoric about globalization characterize the South African government's political and economic argumentation, and help African National Congress (ANC) leaders and ideologues justify many of their transparently neoliberal strategies. This article offers a critical assessment of the ruling party's divergent discourses (and the uses to which these are put), their underlying presumptions, their intellectual and practical rig…
Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
After Johannesburg, where to for the Movements for Global Justice
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Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the Power Politics of Bourgeois Democracy
Since February 2000, when President Robert Mugabe suffered his first-ever national electoral defeat—over a proposed new constitution—Zimbabwe has witnessed confusing debilitating political turmoil. A decade of economic decline, characteristic of the imposition of structural adjustment across Africa, preceded the rise of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Standards of living had crashed during the 1990s, the state withdrew—or pri…
Political science (116 works) · Law (83 works) · Economics (75 works) · Politics (68 works) · Political economy (66 works) · Sociology (64 works) · Law (57 works) · Development economics (35 works) · South African History and Culture (30 works) · Geography (28 works)