Course content Legal Training Programme Materials


Rethinking Democracy

South Africa boasts the highest inequality globally, despite three decades of democratic governance. Landlessness, exploitation, poverty, racism, violence, corruption, and service collapse persist. Politics faces mounting distrust, associated with elitism, patronage, and divisive agendas. Different explanations and answers to these challenges are presented. As the 2024 elections approach in South Africa and 64 other countries globally, political parties take centre stage: each representing different – or perhaps similar – explanations and answers to a countries challenges. Through delving into these challenges, explanations, and proposed paths to a better future, this course navigates South Africa’s past, present, and potential futures: exploring themes of African solidarity, critically assessing 1994’s significance, integrating global democratic perspectives, and scrutinizing elections’ role in participatory democracy.

Designed specifically for community-based paralegals and fieldworkers who provide a range of services to the communities they serve – including information access,  support with gender based violence cases and matters,  assistance with evictions, labour, consumer and social security matters as well as different kinds of dispute resolution – this course will locate the historical roots of the day-to-day issues that advice offices contend with and contextualize them within broader contestations, resistance and imaginations about democracy.  

Woven through the course are these questions: 

  1. What do the realities that community-based paralegals deal with on an ongoing basis reveal about the texture of South Africa’s democracy? 
  1. How can we explain the persistent and growing inequalities and injustices that dominate South Africa today, nearly 30 years into democratic rule? 
  2. What are some of the big struggles waged in South Africa today? What do they teach us about democracy, resistance and imagination?
  3. What does a democracy for the many, not a few, look like? What can we learn – from the past and today – about attempts to craft expansive and radical notions of democracy?