Covering about  400 000 square kilometers of landscape, the Karoo is one of South Africa’s most beautiful and lucrative areas. Covered with stretches of flora and fauna unknown to the rest of the country and home to the Khoi and Bushmen peoples, this environmental sanctuary is in jeopardy.

With oil reserves rapidly depleting and given the instability of oil prices, it seems that shale gas would be the next palpable step in energy procurement. The issue at hand is a process called hydraulic f...

On Monday, 21 March 2011 South Africa was be celebrating the 51^st anniversary of the fateful 21 March 1960 Sharpville massacre. On that day in history a peaceful demonstration against the 1952 Native Laws Amendment Act, was scheduled to take place in all major cities and townships around SA. The 1960 protest march had been put together by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) to openly defy the former regime’s influx control and dompass (reference book) laws. At the time it was only Africans wi...

On the evening of 26 March, 2010 North Korea deliberately attacked and sunk the 1, 200 ton Cheonan, a South Korean naval vessel, killing 46 sailors and wounding many more (Mee-young, 2010). Eight months later on 23 November, North Korea unleashed a barrage of artillery fire on the South Korean occupied island of Yeonpyeong near the disputed Yellow Sea border, killing two soldiers and two civilians (Powell, 2010). South Korea retaliated with returning artillery fire, although there was no info...

About two weeks ago, 1 March 2011, a regional environmental seminar took place in Johannesburg. This seminar was mainly organised by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in partnership with the Association of European Parliamentarians with Africa (AEPA). As one might guess, top of the agenda was to address the issue of environmental degradation and climate change effected by ‘global warming’. Global warming, lexically unpacked, refers to the warming/ heating ...

The realm of international and regional governance is one that is often plagued by conflictual interests and budgetary constraints. The United Nation’s framework of international governance is considered to be the most efficient, particularly when this framework has a regional partner. This regional body or partner is essentially a regional duplicate of the original United Nations (UN) model. 

The aims and objectives of the UN are primarily to ensure and maintain international peace and s...

African States are usually analysed under a common umbrella of continued instability and strong man politics. This is often an accurate description of many African political configurations; however political analysts often make the mistake of categorising all African states in the same light. In light of this, it is important to have an informed analogy of African politics by analysing the history and political dynamics of individual African states. A political definition of Dysfunction would...