Jeremy Seekings
Biographic Data
| ID | 134883 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeremy Seekings |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeremy |
| FAMILY NAME | Seekings |
| SIGNATURE | SEEKINGS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8029-412X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 84 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 338 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 81 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Covid-19 and the reform of workfare in Botswana
Covid-19 and the implementation of social protection in Southern Africa
The challenge of global perspectives on global social policy
Everyday Conversations About Economic Inequality
High and rising levels of economic inequality come at a tremendous cost to societies, yet the public is often hesitant to confront these inequalities. Prior research has attempted to explain this paradox, pointing to how it is driven by individuals' misperceptions of the extent of inequality, broader narratives that justify inequality, and distrust in government intervention and redistribution. These beliefs and attitudes are not simply a reflect…
The Future Politics of Social Protection in Africa
International organisations and their local allies continue to press for the further expansion of social protection across Africa, often in the face of resistance. The future politics of social protection in Africa will be shaped by endogenous and exogenous changes. Endogenous changes involve feedback effects from the past and continuing expansion of social protection; these can be either positive or negative in terms of further expansion. Exogen…
Introduction to special issue
While social protection provision in Africa has primarily focused on the reduction of food insecurity and income poverty, it has the potential to transform the relationship between citizens and states. The articles in this special issue provide insights into the theoretical, normative, and empirical assessment of the transformative consequences of social protection programmes across parts of East, West and Southern Africa. The articles reveal tha…
The implementation of social protection in a conservative African welfare regime
Social protection has grown in importance in framing the relationship between citizens and states across much of Africa. Botswana's conservative welfare regime relies heavily on local officials – many of whom are trained social workers – to exercise discretion in assessing the needs of poor people and registering them on social protection programmes. Interviews with local officials reveal that they attribute poverty and destitution primarily to t…
The politics of ‘institutionalising’ social protection in Africa
Social protection has expanded unevenly across Africa because of variations in both the initial adoption of programmes and their subsequent ‘institutionalisation’ through government-funded expansions in coverage. The case of Zambia illustrates how policy coalitions promoting the institutionalisation of social protection compete with other claimants over prioritisation in public spending. Even when faced with competitive elections, incumbent gover…
High Modernist Hubris and its Subversion in South Africa's Covid-19 Vaccination Roll-Out
The South African government presented its strategy for rolling out vaccinations against Covid–19 in 2021 as a comprehensive plan designed by technocratic experts working with the country’s leading scientists. This imagery built on the government’s prior claims that its responses to Covid over the previous year ‘followed the science’. In 2021, as in 2020, this framing functioned ideologically to justify projects of expanded government control ove…
Incumbent disadvantage in a swing province
Might incumbency entail disadvantages as well as advantages? This article examines the performance of incumbent president Edgar Lungu and the Patriotic Front (PF) in Zambia's Eastern Province in the 2021 election. Eastern Province was a 'swing' region in that neither of the two major national political parties had deep-rooted support, despite Lungu's and the PF's strong performance in 2015-16. Survey data shows that voters punished the incumbent …
Pandemic, lockdown and the stalled urbanization of welfare regimes in Southern Africa
While Covid-19 caused few fatalities across most of Africa – with the notable exception of South Africa – the indirect economic effects were substantial, especially in urban areas. International organizations encouraged governments to expand their provision, especially for the urban poor. South Africa extended temporarily its already considerable system of social protection and introduced new implementation systems. Elsewhere, governments that ha…
Cooperatives and the reorganisation of labour-intensive production in South Africa’s clothing industry
Wage regulation in South Africa’s clothing industry has pushed low-wage producers to restructure themselves as partnerships between former employers, now intermediaries, and worker cooperatives. The proliferation of employer-initiated cooperatives in the clothing sector reflects and poses challenges to South Africa’s system of industrial-level bargaining, to unionisation, and to the government’s unevenly implemented strategy of using minimum wage…
The Effects of Colonialism on Social Protection in South Africa and Botswana
This chapter examines how two former British territories—South Africa and Botswana—followed quite different paths toward an apparently similar system of social protection, focused on social assistance programs. South Africa’s adoption of social assistance programs was shaped by ideas and models from Britain (as well as Australia and New Zealand), but adapted to local conditions (including especially the perceived need to uphold a racial hierarchy…
The vernacularisation of global rights discourses and social protection in regional African arena
International organisations have increasingly advocated a rights-based approach to social protection, especially in Africa, despite persistent criticisms from some African scholars that the globally dominant discourse of human rights reflects a specifically ‘western’ ideology. Regional African inter-governmental organisations have occupied a frontline between international organisations and national governments in ‘vernacularising’ global rights,…
Covid vs. Democracy
In March 2020, South Africa’s government imposed a severe lockdown in response to the covid-19 pandemic. The economic and social costs of the lockdown—coming on top of preexisting unemployment, poverty, hunger, and deep inequality—resulted in strong pressures on the government to ease it just as the pandemic accelerated, especially in June and July. The combination of pandemic and lockdown exposed anew incompetent state institutions (with limited…
John Aerni-Flessner. Dreams for Lesotho
John Aerni-Flessner’s Dreams for Lesotho: Independence, Foreign Assistance, and Development is a subversive book. Aerni-Flessner contests the argument that the hegemony of “development” from the 1940s across much of the Global South was due simply to the ideological and financial power of the international and national “development” agencies based in the Global North. Using the case of Lesotho, focusing on the 1960s especially, Aerni-Flessner con…
Recht Und Entwicklung Allgemein / Law and Development in General
The National Party and the Ideology of Welfare in South Africa under Apartheid
The expansion of social welfare programmes under apartheid accords with the analysis of most recent studies of apartheid that have emphasised the expansion of modernist governance. Yet the National Party (NP) consistently denounced the concept of a ‘welfare state’. Public provision was always viewed as less important than – and often as detracting from – familial and individual responsibility, even for the state’s white citizens. The survival of …
The Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
The notion that social protection should be a key strategy for reducing poverty in developing countries has now been mainstreamed within international development policy and practice. Promoted as an integral dimension of the post-Washington Consensus that emerged around the turn of the new millennium, all major international development agencies and bilateral donors now include a strong focus on social protection in their advocacy and programmati…
The Negotiated Politics of Social Protection in East and Southern Africa
Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The existing literature on social assistance, or social protection more broadly, offers little in explanation of this variation. Drawing on the literature on political settlements and democratic politics,…
Politics of Social Protection in Eastern and Southern Africa
The limits to ‘global’ social policy
Bob Deacon’s study of the Social Protection Floors initiative, led by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), entailed a pioneering study of the making of global social policy. Just how global is this ‘global social policy’ in terms of both its making and its subsequent diffusion? African governments were minimally involved in the making of this global social policy. Most seem to have acquiesced in this global policy-making, as they have wit…
The conditional legitimacy of claims made by mothers and other kin in South Africa
Because redistribution concerns ‘who gets what and from whom’, redistributive conflicts revolve around ‘who should get what and from whom’. Individuals as well as states distinguish between deserving and undeserving claimants. People may favour people they know over strangers, kin over non-kin, or some kin over other kin. This paper uses data from survey experiments to show that young South Africans distinguish between deserving and undeserving c…
Consequences of social protection on intergenerational relationships in South Africa
Categorically-targeted social assistance programmes have considerable potential to reduce poverty and buttress the dignity of disadvantaged groups of people, but they can also generate tensions over financial support and care within households and families. This is especially likely in contexts in the global South where landlessness and unemployment combine with historically-rooted norms and practices to underpin complex patterns of interdependen…
Difference in whiteness
The continuing salience of race
The end of apartheid has brought a resurgence of research into racial identities, attitudes and behaviour in South Africa. The legacy of systematic racial ordering and discrimination under apartheid is that South Africa remains deeply racialised, in cultural and social terms, as well as deeply unequal, in terms of the distribution of income and opportunities. South Africans continue to see themselves in the racial categories of the apartheid era,…
The UDF
Not a Single White Person Should Be Allowed to Go Under’
The origins of South Africa's distinctive welfare state lay in the late 1920s, not in the 1930s as has generally been suggested, and long predated the quite different turn to social welfare in late colonial Africa. For the National Party and Labour Party – partners in the coalition Pact Government of 1924–9 – non-contributory old-age pensions were a crucial pillar in the ‘civilized labour’ policies designed to lift ‘poor whites’ out of poverty an…
Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa
Introduction
Mandela's lost province
The first democratic elections in South Africa, in April 1994, resulted in a victory for the African National Congress (ANC). In two major provinces, however, the ANC was defeated. In the Western Cape the ANC lost to the National Party (NP), and in KwaZulu/Natal it lost to the Inkatha Freedom Party. Most interpretations of the elections assert the pre‐eminence of race and ethnicity. Our analysis of the ANC and the elections in the Western Cape su…
The Broader Importance of Welfare Reform in South Africa
On the agenda for welfare reform in South Africa are proposals to expand the public provision of welfare in radical new ways. Not only does this contrast with the prevailing global trend of retrenchment in public welfare systems, but the proposed ‘basic income grant’ in South Africa is an innovation that remains a fringe idea even in the established welfare states of the North. The very unusual agenda for welfare reform in South Africa is based o…
Democracy and distribution in highly unequal economies
Given that incomes in South Africa are distributed very unequally, it might be expected that the establishment of representative democracy would result in the adoption of redistributive policies. Yet overall inequality has not declined since 1994. The electoral and party system provides uneven pressure for redistribution. The fact that poor South Africans have the vote ensures that some areas of public policy do help the poor. The post-apartheid …
The Decline of South Africa's Civic Organizations, 1990-1996
Strategic choices were an important factor in the decline of neighborhood-based civic organizations in South Africa's black townships during the process of democratization. But these strategic choices need to be understood in terms of the initial character of civic organizations as a 'popular' rather than 'social' movement in the 1980s, and the changes in the political context in the early and mid-1990s. During 1990-92 civics sought to define dis…
South Africa's hybrid care regime
The post-apartheid state in South Africa inherited a care regime that historically combined liberal, social democratic and conservative features. The post-apartheid state has sought to deracialise the care regime, through extending to the African majority the privileges that hitherto had been largely confined to the white minority, and to transform it, to render it more appropriate to the needs and norms of the African majority. Deracialisation p…
Trade unions, social policy & class compromise in post-apartheid South Africa
The poor benefit greatly through redistribution through the budget in South Africa: Poor children attend public schools in large numbers and poor households benefit from a public welfare system that is exceptional in comparative terms. Trade unions have championed these apparently pro-poor policies, even though the trade union movement is not a movement of the poor in South Africa (there are very few union members in the poorest half of the popul…
British Colonial Policy, Local Politics, and the Origins of the Mauritian Welfare State, 1936–50
Mauritius's unusual welfare state dates back to the introduction of non-contributory old-age pensions in 1950. This article examines the origins of this reform, focusing on the interactions between political actors in both Mauritius (local planters, political activists, and the colonial government) and London (the Colonial Office and Labour Party). Faced with riots among unorganised sugar estate workers in 1937, the colonial administration consid…
The limits to ‘global’ social policy
Bob Deacon’s study of the Social Protection Floors initiative, led by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), entailed a pioneering study of the making of global social policy. Just how global is this ‘global social policy’ in terms of both its making and its subsequent diffusion? African governments were minimally involved in the making of this global social policy. Most seem to have acquiesced in this global policy-making, as they have wit…
Race, attitudes and behaviour in racially-mixed, low-income neighbourhoods in Cape Town, South Africa
The end of apartheid in South Africa has not led to widespread racial desegregation and racial integration. Racial segregation and antipathy appear to have deep and enduring roots. There has been some racial desegregation in middle-class or elite neighbourhoods, due to the rapid upward mobility of some 'African', 'coloured' and 'Indian' people, but very little racial desegregation across most of the country. This article examines exceptional case…
Democratization and Politics in South African Townships
In South Africa, as in many other countries, there appears to have been a demobilization of mass urban movements following the achievement of representative democracy. This apparent demobilization has led to a perception that South Africa's neighbourhood-based civic organizations are in crisis. This article builds on existing studies by sharpening analysis of the nature of this 'crisis'. We show that there continue to be high levels of popular en…
Trailing behind the masses
The formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in South Africa in mid‐1983 was followed in 1984 by an escalation of township protests, especially in the Pretoria‐Witwatersrand‐Vaal region. This article argues that during the period from 1983 to early 1985 the UDF had only an indirect impact on township politics in this region. As the UDF's national secretary, Popo Molefe, observed, the UDF was ‘trailing behind the masses’. The UDF's lack of d…
Incumbent disadvantage in a swing province
Might incumbency entail disadvantages as well as advantages? This article examines the performance of incumbent president Edgar Lungu and the Patriotic Front (PF) in Zambia's Eastern Province in the 2021 election. Eastern Province was a 'swing' region in that neither of the two major national political parties had deep-rooted support, despite Lungu's and the PF's strong performance in 2015-16. Survey data shows that voters punished the incumbent …
The vernacularisation of global rights discourses and social protection in regional African arena
International organisations have increasingly advocated a rights-based approach to social protection, especially in Africa, despite persistent criticisms from some African scholars that the globally dominant discourse of human rights reflects a specifically ‘western’ ideology. Regional African inter-governmental organisations have occupied a frontline between international organisations and national governments in ‘vernacularising’ global rights,…
The Rise and Fall of the Weberian Analysis of Class in South Africa between 1949 and the Early 1970s
The hegemony of Marxist approaches to the study of stratification in South Africa has obscured the prominence of Weberian contributions between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. Some of these Weberian studies focused on the nascent black middle class, paying particular attention to the importance of status. Others, influenced by the literature on the American South, used the concept of caste as an extreme form of status in analysing the relatio…
The Carnegie Commission and the Backlash against Welfare State-Building in South Africa, 1931-1937
By the late 1930s, South Africa had developed a welfare state that was remarkable in terms of both the range of risks against which it provided and its coverage of the poor – although only for poor white and coloured people. The Carnegie Commission of Inquiry into the Poor White Problem in South Africa is often credited with the major role in prompting this welfare statebuilding. This is, at most, only partly true. Firstly, key aspects of the wel…
Pa's Pension’
In 1937–38 Barbados introduced old-age pensions for its poor, black population. This radical innovation – the first in a British colony – occurred in Barbados as part of a slow movement towards social (as well as political) reform, driven by a combination of reformist colonial officials and an emergent black political leadership against the opposition of the conservative white planter and merchant elite, in specific social and economic conditions…
Consequences of social protection on intergenerational relationships in South Africa
Categorically-targeted social assistance programmes have considerable potential to reduce poverty and buttress the dignity of disadvantaged groups of people, but they can also generate tensions over financial support and care within households and families. This is especially likely in contexts in the global South where landlessness and unemployment combine with historically-rooted norms and practices to underpin complex patterns of interdependen…
Just Deserts
This article examines how racial differences affect perceptions of distributive justice in post-apartheid South Africa. In ‘divided’ societies, citizens might be expected to discriminate on the basis of race or culture in assessing the justice of other citizens’ claims. South Africa is a prime example of a ‘divided’ society in which, in the past, legislation and racial elite culture combined in pervasive discrimination. Given the continued import…
Beyond Heroes and Villains
Writing about young people - or the 'youth' - in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s was dominated by representations of them as either the 'heroes' or 'villains' of political struggle. During the political transition, young people attracted a rush of attention as the source of a series of supposed social 'problems'. In much of the rest of Africa, also, scholars and the public alike have focused on the participation of children in civil war…
The uneven development of quantitative social science in South Africa
One of the most striking contrasts between journals in South African studies. (or African studies more broadly) and journals in the social sciences in the USA or Europe is the balance between quantitative and qualitative research. In the USA, especially, a high proportion of contemporary research in political science and sociology as well as economics and development studies entails the analysis of quantitative data using ever more complex statis…
Rent boycotts, the state, and the transformation of the urban political economy in South Africa
The contradictions of South Africa's political economy, in the interaction of politically entrenched racism and capitalist production relations, produces chronic discontent in the townships of the Transvaal and Orange Free State while limiting the political capacity of the State to manage such anger. The consequence has been the urban turmoil of the last three years, a process here analysed through the rent boycotts — and their attendant politica…
Books reviewed
Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Pp. viii and 206. £25.00 Dorothy O. Helly, Livingstone's Legacy: Horace Waller and Victorian Mythmaking (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1987). Pp. xviii + 404. £37.95. Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism. (London and New York: Longman, 1987). Pp. xiii + 462. £9.95 paperback Phyllis Lewsen, Voices of Protest. (…
Books reviewed
Julie Frederikse, The Unbreakable Thread. Non‐Racialism in South Africa (Zed Books Ltd, London), 1990, x + 294pp. Ali A Mazrui, Cultural Forces in World Politics (James Currey, London), 1991 £25.00/£9.95 Nicola Nattrass and Elisabeth Ardington, eds. The Political Economy of South Africa (Oxford University Press: Cape Town, 1990), x + 317 pp., R32.50 paperback. Robert A. Schrire, Critical Choices for South Africa: An Agenda for the 1990s (Oxford U…
Gender Ideology and Township Politics in the 1980's
Trailing behind the masses
The formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in South Africa in mid‐1983 was followed in 1984 by an escalation of township protests, especially in the Pretoria‐Witwatersrand‐Vaal region. This article argues that during the period from 1983 to early 1985 the UDF had only an indirect impact on township politics in this region. As the UDF's national secretary, Popo Molefe, observed, the UDF was ‘trailing behind the masses’. The UDF's lack of d…
From quiescence to 'people's power
Many of South Africa's townships erupted in revolt during the mid‐1980s. At least two forms of transition to revolt and confrontation can be identified. Different factors shaped the respective processes and outcomes of political mobilisation and protest. Existing case‐studies tend to focus on the first form: the initial transition to confrontation in each region, in which local factors were of primary importance. This article focuses on the secon…
Heroes or Villains? Youth Politics in the 1980s
Mandela's lost province
The first democratic elections in South Africa, in April 1994, resulted in a victory for the African National Congress (ANC). In two major provinces, however, the ANC was defeated. In the Western Cape the ANC lost to the National Party (NP), and in KwaZulu/Natal it lost to the Inkatha Freedom Party. Most interpretations of the elections assert the pre‐eminence of race and ethnicity. Our analysis of the ANC and the elections in the Western Cape su…
The Decline of South Africa's Civic Organizations, 1990-1996
Strategic choices were an important factor in the decline of neighborhood-based civic organizations in South Africa's black townships during the process of democratization. But these strategic choices need to be understood in terms of the initial character of civic organizations as a 'popular' rather than 'social' movement in the 1980s, and the changes in the political context in the early and mid-1990s. During 1990-92 civics sought to define dis…
Shorter reviews
Crush, Jonathan and James Wilmot (eds.) Crossing boundaries: mine migrancy in a democratic South Africa Smith, Michael Peter (ed.) Marginal spaces: comparative urban and community research, volume 5 Harrington, J.W. and B. Wharf Industrial location: principles, practice and policy King, Desmond Separate and unequal. Black Americans and the US Federal government
From the ballot box to the bookshelf
Election ‘94 South Africa: The Campaigns, Results and Future ProspectsM edited by Andrew Reynolds. David Philip, Cape Town, 1994. xvii plus 237pp. including index, photographs and tables. Launching Democracy in South Africa: The First Open Election, April 1994 edited by R.W. Johnson and Lawrence Schlemmer. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996. xiv plus 412pp. including index and tables. The Election Book: Judgement and Choice in South Africa's …
Citizenship and Welfare in South Africa
(1997). Citizenship and Welfare in South Africa: Deracialisation and Inequality in a Labour-Surplus Economy. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines: Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 452-481
The Origins of Social Citizenship in Pre-Apartheid South Africa
South Africa's 1996 Constitution promises a measure of ‘social citizenship’ alongside formal political and legal equality. South Africa's public welfare and social policies may be less effective in ensuring social citizenship, through reducing insecurity and inequality, than those of the more established democracies, but they are far more effective than those of other ‘developing’ countries. The origins of social citizenship in South Africa lie i…
The UDF
Introduction
Democratization and Politics in South African Townships
In South Africa, as in many other countries, there appears to have been a demobilization of mass urban movements following the achievement of representative democracy. This apparent demobilization has led to a perception that South Africa's neighbourhood-based civic organizations are in crisis. This article builds on existing studies by sharpening analysis of the nature of this 'crisis'. We show that there continue to be high levels of popular en…
Bo-Tsotsi
Democracy and distribution in highly unequal economies
Given that incomes in South Africa are distributed very unequally, it might be expected that the establishment of representative democracy would result in the adoption of redistributive policies. Yet overall inequality has not declined since 1994. The electoral and party system provides uneven pressure for redistribution. The fact that poor South Africans have the vote ensures that some areas of public policy do help the poor. The post-apartheid …
The UDF
The uneven development of quantitative social science in South Africa
One of the most striking contrasts between journals in South African studies. (or African studies more broadly) and journals in the social sciences in the USA or Europe is the balance between quantitative and qualitative research. In the USA, especially, a high proportion of contemporary research in political science and sociology as well as economics and development studies entails the analysis of quantitative data using ever more complex statis…
The Broader Importance of Welfare Reform in South Africa
On the agenda for welfare reform in South Africa are proposals to expand the public provision of welfare in radical new ways. Not only does this contrast with the prevailing global trend of retrenchment in public welfare systems, but the proposed ‘basic income grant’ in South Africa is an innovation that remains a fringe idea even in the established welfare states of the North. The very unusual agenda for welfare reform in South Africa is based o…
Trade Unions and Democratisation in South Africa, 1985-1997
On the Threshold of Freedom
South African Matrix (Part 2)
Are South Africa's cities changing? Indications from the mid-1990s
Books reviewed in this article:Scott A. Bollens, Urban peace-building in divided societies: Belfast and JohannesburgAlan Morris, Bleakness and light: inner-city transition in Hillbrow, JohannesburgRobert Cameron, Democratisation of South African local government: a tale of three citiesSusan Parnell, Edgar Pieterse, Mark Swilling and Dominique Wooldridge (eds.), Democratising local government: the South African experimentGrant R. Saff, Changing Ca…
Political science (72 works) · Law (57 works) · Politics (56 works) · Sociology (49 works) · Economics (44 works) · Development economics (35 works) · Political economy (28 works) · Law (24 works) · South African History and Culture (23 works) · Democracy (21 works)