Political Risk to the Mining Sector in South Africa

Posted on August 12, 2022 by Assistant Editor

Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 10, No. 8, August 2022

The image is of Randfontein Mine in Johannesburg, South Africa. Mining equipment dotters the brown landscape against a blue sky.

Randfontein Mine, Johannesburg, November 2014. Source: Paul Raad via Flickr.

Ndzalama Cleopatra Mathebula
Institute of Risk Management South Africa

Generally defined, political risk is the expected cost or loss incurred by a business due to political decisions, events, and actions. With the evolution of the discipline, it is not only government or organizations that can generate political risks, but also labour unions and civil society that can emanate risks. The South African mining sector includes abundant political risk yet is an attractive investment destination given its large platinum, gold, and coal reserves.

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South Africa’s Hidden Pandemic: Rape

Posted on February 15, 2022 by Assistant Editor

Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 10, No. 2, February 2022

Anti-femicide protest in Cape Town in response to the murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana. Protestors hold up signs saying "When is Enough Enough" and "Am I Next" against the backdrop of green mountains and blue sky.

Anti-femicide protest in Cape Town in response to the murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana. Wikimedia Commons.

Stephanie Wild
University of Cape Town

42,289. This is the number of women raped in South Africa in 2019. Such shocking levels of sexual violence have prompted President Cyril Ramaphosa to dub gender-based violence as a “second pandemic”, second only to COVID-19.

Violence against women does not end there. Murder rates against women are also extremely high. A widely discussed statistic amongst South Africans is that a woman is murdered every four hours. This statistic was for the April to December 2016 period. The most up-to-date statistics are even more shocking. In the 2017 to 2018 period, a woman was murdered every 3 hours. Such data has prompted a discussion of what is now called “femicide.”

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Boycott the Chinese Language: Standard Mandarin is the Medium of Chinese Communist Party Expansion

Posted on November 16, 2018 by admin

Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 11, November 2018

The photograph depicts Chinese-style buildings and lanterns. There are also urban traffic signs in English and Mandarin.

These urban traffic signs in English and Mandarin are located in the Chinatown district of Seattle. Consciously preferring the use of classical characters and Taiwanese Mandarin in the U.S. would be a statement against the Chinese Communist Party and its usage of Standard Mandarin and simplified characters. Source: Flickr.

By Anders Corr, Ph.D.

Publisher of the Journal of Political Risk

China is one of history’s most dangerous countries. In August, the United Nations reported that China is holding approximately one million minority Muslims in Xinjiang concentration camps. China supports anti-democratic regimes and terrorist groups worldwide. Its military is seeking to expand its territory in: Japanese and South Korean areas of the East China Sea; Philippine, Malaysian, Bruneian, Indonesian, and Vietnamese parts of the South China Sea; and Indian and Bhutanese territory in the Himalayan mountains. President Xi Jinping has since 2013 increased military spending, hyped China’s nationalism, repressed minorities and human rights activists, eliminated term limits on his increasingly personal form of rule, and extended the geographic reach and individual depth of state surveillance.

Average citizens in democracies who see this trend can feel powerless in response. But there are tools at the disposal of empowered citizens and social movements to encourage, complement and accentuate actions taken by our democratic governments. Both citizen and government action is essential to encourage democracy and democratic elements in China, history’s most powerful totalitarian state.

These tools include consumer boycotts and protests at Chinese embassies, for example. But there is an additional social movement tactic that could powerfully communicate the world’s criticism: a boycott of mainland China’s national language, Standard Mandarin, a combination of the Putonghua dialect spoken in Beijing with simplified characters. Putonghua is also called Modern Standard Chinese, which was promoted since the 1940s, and which the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have zealously promoted since 1956 as a form of increasing state control beyond Beijing. I here call the combination of simplified characters and Putonghua, “PRC Mandarin” or “CCP Chinese”. Taiwan uses traditional characters and speaks a slight variant of Mandarin called Taiwanese Mandarin (Guoyu).

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