Overcoming Historical Injustices: Land Reconciliation in South Africa

by James L. Gibson

• ISBN13: 9780521517881
• ISBN10: 0521517885
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-07-20
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Overcoming Historical Land Injustices in South Africa is the last entry in Gibson's "overcoming trilogy" on South Africa's transformation from apartheid to democracy. Focusing on the issue of historical land dispossessions - the taking of African land under colonialism and apartheid - this book investigates the judgments South Africans make about the fairness of their country's past. Should, for instance, land seized under apartheid be returned today to its rightful owner? Gibson's research zeroes in on group identities and attachments as the thread that connects people to the past. Even when individuals have experienced no direct harm in the past, they care about the fairness of the treatment of their group to the extent that they identify with that group. Gibson's analysis shows that land issues in contemporary South Africa are salient, volatile, and enshrouded in symbols and, most important, that interracial differences in understandings of the past and preferences for the future are profound.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. xi
List of Tables	p. xiii
Preface and Acknowledgments	p. xv
Land Reconciliation and Theories of Justice, Past and Present	p. 1
Commonsense Justice	p. 4
Land Issues in South Africa	p. 11
Justice Considerations Implicated	p. 19
Multiculturalism and the Justice of Land Reconciliation	p. 22
Specific Empirical Issues Addressed in This Research	p. 26
An Overview of the Land Reconciliation Survey	p. 28
A Chapter-by-Chapter Overview of This Book	p. 28
Naming, Blaming, and Claiming on Historical Land Injustices: The Views of the South African People	p. 31
The Salience of the Land Issue	p. 34
The Sanctity of Private Property	p. 40
Allocating Blame for Land Injustices	p. 45
The History of Land Injustice in South Africa	p. 48
The Extent of Land Grieving	p. 53
Policy Attitudes	p. 63
Support for the Rule of Law	p. 75
Land Activism	p. 79
Summary and Conclusions	p. 79
Group Identities and Land Policy Preferences	p. 86
Identities and Group History	p. 87
Social Identity Theory and Sociotropic Justice	p. 90
Measuring Group Identities	p. 92
Connecting Identities to Land Politics	p. 106
The Larger Symbolic Context of Land	p. 110
Social Identities and Land Policy Preferences	p. 120
Discussion and Concluding Comments	p. 125
Appendix to Chapter 3: Measurement	p. 128
Applied Justice Judgments: The Problem of Squatting	p. 132
The Problem of Squatting and Its Relationship to Commonsense Justice	p. 134
The Experiment - The Squatter Vignette	p. 137
Fairness Judgments: The Dependent Variable	p. 143
Analysis	p. 144
Group Identities and Perceptions of Fairness	p. 155
Discussion and Concluding Comments	p. 160
Appendix to Chapter 4: The Full Squatter Vignettes	p. 162
Judging the Past: Historical versus Contemporary Claims to Land	p. 169
The Experiment - The Land Conflict Vignette	p. 170
Manipulation Checks	p. 173
Fairness Judgments: The Dependent Variable	p. 179
Analysis	p. 181
Discussion and Concluding Comments	p. 191
Appendix to Chapter 5: Full Vignettes - Historical Land Conflicts	p. 192
Land Reconciliation and Theories of Justice	p. 211
Expanding Research on Public Opinion and Land Issues	p. 215
Directions for Research on Group Identities	p. 216
Concluding Comments	p. 218
A Note on Race in South Africa	p. 219
The Survey Methodology	p. 221
The Questionnaire	p. 227
References	p. 289
Index	p. 301
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