Debating Ideas is a new section that aims to reflect the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It will offer debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books.

A banner on the Central Methodist Mission church in Green Market Square, Cape Town criticising the South African Arms Deal, Discott, May 4, 2012

The podcast series “African Voices, African Arguments” features African scholars, writers, policy makers and activists on issues of peace, justice and democracy, and is produced by World Peace Foundation and presented in partnership with the World Peace Foundation and The Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University.

Alex de Waal discusses corruption and accountability in the South African context with Hennie van Vuuren, Director of Open Secrets.

‘The role of banks, of auditors, of big law firms is very central to a criminal economy in the world.’

Hennie van Vuuren works as Director of Open Secrets a Cape Town based non-profit working for accountability for private actors who profit from economic crime and related human rights abuses. He has twenty years of experience in the non-profit sector working on issues of corruption and accountability and is a past fellow of the Open Society Foundation for South Africa, Director of the Institute for Security Studies in Cape Town and worked for for Transparency International in Berlin. Hennie is the author of Apartheid Guns & Money: A Tale of Profit (2017/2018) and co-author of The Devil in the Detail: How the Arms Deal Changed Everything (2011).

Alex de Waal is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Considered one of the foremost experts on Sudan and the Horn of Africa, his scholarly work and practice has also probed humanitarian crisis and response, human rights, HIV/AIDS and governance in Africa, and conflict and peace-building.

 

African Arguments is a pan-African platform for news, investigation and opinion that seeks to analyse issues facing the continent, investigate the stories that matter, and amplify a diversity of voices.

The Institute for Global Leadership is an incubator of innovative ways to educate learners at all levels to understand and engage with difficult global issues. They develop new generations of effective and ethical leaders who are able and driven to comprehend complexity, reflect cultural and political nuance, and engage as responsible global citizens in anticipating and confronting the world’s most pressing problems.

The World Peace Foundation (WPF) is an operating foundation affiliated solely with Tufts University’s The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. It provides financial support only for projects that the Foundation has initiated itself.

WPF aims to provide intellectual leadership for peace. Our view is that the world needs a debate about world peace, drawing rigorously on evidence and theory.