Military and security education for regional co-operation: a case study of the Southern African Defence and Security Management Network

This article first summarises approaches to military and security education at tertiary levels for officers and senior security officials, identifying some institutional and conceptual issues, before moving on to a fairly detailed case study of the Southern African Defence and Security Management Network (SADSEM). In its institutional form, from 2000 to 2010, SADSEM was a unique experiment in building a regional network of universities providing training and education in security studies, promoting regional security co-operation and integration and working closely with security forces and governments in the Southern African region. Although it mostly worked in English, it also carried out education and research in French and Portuguese, established an institutional base in ten Southern African Development Community (SADC) nations and delivered programmes in all the then 15 of them. Its activities included providing training and education for defence and security management, civil-military relations, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, policy support and the building of scholarly capacity though regional co-operation. Today SADSEM activities are restricted mainly to an annual security review conference, but its real legacy is in the institutions and capacities it built within several Southern African countries, although not all survive. SADSEM kept a low profile because of extreme sensitivities in Southern Africa around security issues, and this is the first attempt to examine its experience in the context of higher-level security education and training

The Improvising Image: a Jazz Photography Collection

Graduate Winner: 2nd Place, 2006. 19th Annual Carl Neureuther Student Book Collection Competition

Impossible Fiction and the Reader

I ask how audiences engage with impossible fiction, defined here as any fiction of any media which represents an absolute impossibility (excepting cases of empty reference). In particular, I am interested in how impossible fiction is absorbed, understood and enjoyed by its readers. I focus on the practices of readers, and in particular their beliefs and imaginings concerning the content of impossible fiction. I consider three significant issues in this area. First, the concept of normalisation, which I adapt from literary theory. Normalisation explains observations from Daniel Nolan and Derek Matravers about the tendency for readers to view impossible fictions as examples of unreliable narration. Second, the puzzlement readers experience when a work of impossible fiction proves to be beyond conventional understanding. Considering work by Umberto Eco, as well as philosophical treatments of the sublime, I suggest that this puzzlement may have unique effects on the reader’s aesthetic judgements of a fiction. Third, I consider when and why impossibilities are and are not part of what the reader imagines while engaged with an impossible fiction. This follows work by Tamar Gendler and Kathleen Stock on how readers imagine impossibilities in fiction. Each of these analyses is accompanied by examples from the wide range of impossible fictions, from postmodernist experiments like Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Maison de Rendez-vous to contemporary horror such as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. The range of examples from fiction is almost as diverse and disparate as existing academic work on reader engagement with impossible fiction, but I draw out common features in both bodies of literature. I combine work in imagination, fiction and narratology in order to provide a robust, principled description of how and why readers engage with impossible fiction

The marine geology of Mossel Bay, South Africa

Includes bibliographical references.This thesis presents work undertaken to better understand the complex evolution of the terrestrial landscape now submerged by high sea levels offshore of Mossel Bay along the South Coast of South Africa. Three marine geophysical surveys and scuba diving were used to examine evidence of past sea-level fluctuations and interpret geological deposits on the seafloor. Additional geological mapping of coastal outcrops was carried out to link land and sea features and rock samples were dated using Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL). Geophysical investigations include a regional seismic survey extending from Still Bay in the west to Buffels Bay in the east out to a maximum water depth of 110 m; a high-resolution investigation of the Mossel Bay shelf using multibeam bathymetry, side-scan sonar and sub-bottom profiling; and a shallow seismic pinger survey of Swartvlei, the most prominent coastal lake in the Wilderness Embayment. This study presents 9 discrete seismic sequences, and describes major offshore geomorphic features such as submerged sea cliffs, palaeo-coastal zones and fluvial systems. Oscillation in sea level between ca. 2.7 and 0.9 Ma likely resulted in the formation of the prominent -45 m terrace, which separates a relatively steep inner from a low-gradient mid shelf. Beach and dune deposits span from Marine Isotope Stage 15 (MIS 15) (582 ka) to Recent based on an age model that integrates OSL ages and the established eustatic sea-level record. The most prominent deposits date from the MIS 6 glacial to MIS 5 interglacial periods and include incised lowstand river channels and regressive aeolianites that extended at least 10 km inland from their associated palaeoshorelines. The MIS 5 deposits include transgressive beachrock, an extensive foreshore unit which prograded on the MIS 5e highstand, and regressive beach and dune deposits on the shelf associated with the subsequent fall in sea level. MIS 4 lowstand incised river channels were infilled with sediment truncated during rapid landward shoreface migration at the MIS 4 termination. Lowenergy, back-barrier MIS 4/3 sediments are preserved as a result of overstepping associated with meltwater pulses of the MIS 2 termination. The MIS 1 sediment wedge comprises reworked sediment and is best developed on the inner shelf. Holocene highstand sedimentation continues to prograde. Accommodation space for coastal deposits is controlled by antecedent drainage pathways and the gradient of the adjacent inner continental shelf. The geological deposits on the emergent shelf indicate a greatly expanded glacial coastal plain that potentially received more rain feeding low-gradient meandering rivers and wetland lakes. These extensive wetland environments provided a rich source of diverse food types which along with abundant marine resources on the shoreline made the Southern Coastal Plain an ideal habitat for our ancestors

Intentional Leadership Development in High School Student Athletes: A Training Program for Facilitators

Leadership is an important aspect of life. Without leadership chaos might ensue. From politics to parenting, an essential part of the world at large deals with leaders. To be a great and effective leader is difficult; a bigger challenge comes when trying to teach someone else how to do the same. Leadership’s critical role in our world makes it vitally important to facilitate the development of the multifaceted skills involved. Students are put into leadership positions every day without training or guidance on how to lead effectively. A high school sports captain, for example, is nominated by teammates or coaches, thus placed in a compromising position: choosing whether to be a friend or a leader but not both. Therefore, developing a leadership program for student athletes is of supreme importance. Ultimately, this need for an intentional leadership development program prompted the authors to develop the Student-Athlete Leadership Team (SALT) and a corresponding manual for mentors. Each athletic season the student athletes in SALT are taught Kouzes and Posner’s (2007) Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. Kouzes and Posner (2007) suggested that collective abilities and skills encompass characteristics of effective leaders who move followers to work towards a common goal. The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership are (a) Model the Way, (b) Inspire a Shared Vision, (c) Challenge the Process, (d) Enable Others to Act, and (e) Encourage the Heart

Projected inundations on the South African coast by tsunami waves

Historical and recent evidence recorded along the South African coast suggests that five tsunami events have occurred since 1960. These were mostly associated with trigger mechanisms associated with sources of remote submarine seismicity along far-field subduction zones and local atmospheric disturbances (meteotsunami). The passive margin of the South African West Coast, and the broad Agulhas Bank spanning the South- and Southeast coasts, have contributed to an increased susceptibility to inundation of waves in the adjacent low-lying coastal areas in these regions. In the published models and empirical studies for South Africa, the bathymetry and orientation of Port Elizabeth Bay is seen to amplify effects of a tsunami wave. Other regions including the Cape Town and St Helena Bay areas are also vulnerable to coastal inundation through the data generated in this study. The methodology presented here provides a simple means of determining the susceptibility of coastal areas to significant inundation by far-field tsunamis

THE SOUTH AFRICAN ‘WAR RESISTANCE’ MOVEMENT 1974–1994

From the mid-1970s until the onset of negotiations to end apartheid in 1990, escalating military conflict in the Southern African region was accompanied by a steady increase of conscription dependent on the white male population in South Africa. This was compounded by a process of militarisation in the white community, under the apartheid regime’s ‘total national security strategy’.[i]In turn, this provoked a counter-reaction in the form a movement of resistance to conscription and more generally to the various internal and external conflicts. Resistance was initially led by exiled self-styled ‘war resisters’ who set up a number of support organisations. After some political contestation, one such organisation, the Committee on South African War Resistance (COSAWR) emerged as the leading force and aligned itself openly with the African National Congress (ANC). This paper is the first academic contribution to focus on COSAWR and touches on its legacy in terms of its influence on the ANC and the policy frameworks it helped establish for post-apartheid security policy

The View from Downstream: aesthetic effects of imaginative resistance

Existing philosophical work on imaginative resistance regularly assumes that any impact resistance has on aesthetic judgements is always negative. I challenge this assumption. To do so I illustrate how resistance can cause a reader to undergo one of two changes in the way she engages with a fiction. The first is narrative doubt, a process which I compare to unreliable narration. The second is imaginative alienation, wherein the reader employs a lower kind of imaginative activity when engaging with the fiction. I describe the features of these, and explain how each can affect aesthetic judgements positively as well as negatively. Finally, I argue that even if no change in engagement occurs, there are certain circumstances in which imaginative resistance can have a positive effect on a reader’s aesthetic judgement of a fiction

Observations on the taxonomy of the sub-families Erirhininae and Eugnominae of the Curculiodae (Coloptera) and on the biology of diverse genera of the family

Abstract Not Provided

An assessment of coastal vulnerability for the South African coast

Coastal vulnerability is the degree to which a coastal system is susceptible to, or unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change. One of the most widely used methods in assessing risk and vulnerability of coastlines on a regional scale includes the calculation of vulnerability indices and presenting these results on a vulnerability map. These maps can assist coastal managers, planners, landowners and stakeholders identify regions of greater risk to coastal hazards and ultimately better inform mitigation and development strategies.This paper discusses the creation of a coastal vulnerability map for South Africa. The criteria used included elevation to chart datum, beach width, tidal range, wave height, geology, geomorphology, anthropogenic activities, distance to 20m isobaths and relative sea level change. The values of these parameters were divided into classes and the various classes ranked on a scale of 1 (very low vulnerability) to 5 (very high vulnerability) using examples from literature and expert knowledge. The layers were combined using the spatial overlay (map algebra) technique to create the final map. The results highlight the most vulnerable areas along the coastlines as the areas surrounding the City of Cape Town (the west coast) and the regions close to East London and Port St. Johns on the east coast. This can be mainly attributed to the type of geology and the anthropogenic activities in these areas