EISA Book Launch

22 October 2008

EISA is pleased to announce the launch of two new books, The State, Democracy and Poverty Eradication in Africa and Walking a Tightrope: EISA and the Challenges of Democracy 1996-2007. Both of these publications are being launched at the Third Annual EISA Symposium in Maputo this week.

Please order your copies here.

1 Walking a Tightrope: EISA and the Challenges of Democracy 1996-2006

Julia Katherine Seirlis

This book was commissioned to celebrate the tenth anniversary of what began as the Electoral Institute of South Africa (EISA). EISA was established in July 1996. Its origins lie in multiple places and at other times. As Dren Nupen, EISA's founder and executive director from 1996 to 2002, points out:

Organisations don't just emerge. They are the collective experience of people, ideas and pressures.
Interview 17 September 2006

In the past ten years EISA has enlarged its scope and geographical reach, expanding its regional involvement in SADC countries. It has opened field offices in the Democratic Republic of Congo (February 2004), Angola (May 2004), Mozambique (July 2004), Madagascar (2007) and a short-term office in Burundi (January 2005). At the same time, as its staff has emphasised, it has retained several core elements (elections, democracy and governance) and core values (independence, impartiality and support).

EISA's original mandate was to promote free and fair elections and to raise popular awareness of democratic principles and practices. Today its mission is 'to promote credible elections and democratic governance in Africa'. The story of EISA is, therefore, the story of the connections between elections, democracy, governance and human rights.

These connections cannot be examined adequately through a prosopography, a laundry list of projects, a department-by-depar tment review, or a catalogue of the organisation's successes and failures. They require an investigation into what constitutes 'free and fair' or 'credible' elections, what 'democratic governance' and 'democratic principles and practices' actually mean, and what challenges are involved in implementing and realising them. They require that EISA be placed in the wider context of the debates about democracy, civil society and the state.

To this end, the book's title, Walking a Tightrope, frames its narrative and approach. EISA's work is a series of balancing acts: between the state and civil society; between the new world order and the political and economic realities of the African continent; between relativism and political activism; between ideals and the practicalities of survival; and between the crisis in politics, democracy and human rights and the importance and, indeed, necessity of the democratic project.

In many ways, as the book reveals, EISA's enterprise is difficult. But in the context of an increasingly militarised and volatile regional and international politics and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, the work of civil society is more necessary than ever before.

About the author

Julia Katherine Seirlis holds a BA in English, French, Italian, Latin and Private Law from the University of Cape Town, and an MSt and DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Her doctorate examined the relationships between race and space in the construction - and alienation - of coloured identities in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe. After three years of development work in Zimbabwe Dr Seirlis joined the Anthropology Depar tment of the University of the Witwatersrand where she taught from 2002 to 2005. She is currently a freelance researcher and writer.

2 The State, Democracy and Poverty Eradication in Africa

Edited by Khabele Mat losa, Kwesi Kwaa Prah, Bertha Chiroro and Lucien Toulou

Africa's record of governance and development since independence four decades ago is a mixed bag. Few countries in the continent boast a commendable record in terms of democratic governance and the socio-economic livelihood of ordinary people beyond mere economic growth. Most countries are experiencing a crisis of governance combined with a crisis of development. The combined effect of 'mis-governance' and 'mal-development' has exacerbated political instability and deepened the scourge of poverty. Policy efforts toward poverty eradication have not generated optimism that the continent will meet the Millennium Development Goals by the year 2015.

In order for Africa to make appreciable progress in tackling the governance and development crises and strive toward eradication of both income and human poverty, it requires a functional and capable state. The state ought to play a complementary role to markets in eradicating poverty since markets on their own are incapable of eradicating poverty. Democratic developmental states have greater prospects for advancing sustainable human development than authoritarian states. For this reason, African states need to embrace more than just procedural democracy with emphasis on mere electioneering. They need to embrace substantive democracy that transcends electoralism and advances social justice. Such developmental democracy rooted profoundly in the continent's own cultural context, historico-political trajectories and socio-economic realities is what Africa needs.

EISA gratefully acknowledges the financial support for this project from Sida, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), and the Southern Africa Trust.