Robins Chapter Summary

In his book Robins seeks to understand the central question of how we understand the outpour of popular struggle in the wake of newfound democracy in post-apartheid South Africa.
Robins questions the critique of liberalism by setting forth notion of transition form revolutionary change to ‘rights talk’, and its assortment of applications Robins contends that “Millions of Black working class South Africans are highly literate in the language of rights, equality, citizenship and social justice” (pp. 16). Thus, he rejects radical critics who see NGOs as organizations that narrow political aspirations. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on land rights for the indigenous people, as well as NGOs and their impact on social movements in Namaqualand and Khomani San people. AS a citizen-based group, NGOs in South Africa help to establish and strengthen relationships between the citizens and the state. Thus in a post-Apartheid atmosphere, they broker the expansion of indigenous rights.

Through this, Robin asks “what happens to them when this horizontal networking is then cast in a world of centralized political culture?” (pp. 79).
Next, in chapters 5-7, Robins strongly addresses the issue of HIV/AIDs, the politics that surround the medical treatment and prevention, and rights talks that surround the surrounded the subject. Robins reviews the conditions that surrounded the activism, HIV/AIDs advancement as it was used to fight former President Mbeki’s ‘AIDs denialism’. He defends that the coalitions involved in strengthening HIV/AIDs research was crucial, despite it going against traditional patriarchal ideas that limited their access to technologies (pp.