Peter Vale
Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria; Honorary Professor in the Humanities, Nelson Mandela University; Visiting Professor, International Relations, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil.
Gimmickry, golf and global gore
2025-05-23"The core issue in global social relationships is white wealth and black poverty. Without understanding this, not gimmickry, not golf can hide the gore of grinding poverty on which social violence feeds."
Three wise monkeys by Charles van Onselen: a book review
2023-09-12"The many intrigues in these pages are told not only by a great writer, but by the country’s foremost historian; Van Onselen’s work opens new ways to think about a range of issues like the responsibilities of scholarship, the idea of southern Africa, and the roots of South Africa’s foreign policy, among other things."
Towards Shakespearean drama: a review of Nuclear: Inside South Africa’s secret deal
2022-06-15"The danger of this story is that the country’s international relations were out of kilter with the views of its people, but – far more importantly – that the Zuma presidency came within a whisker of bankrupting several generations of South African tax payers."
Of paradigms and power politics: The NIICE convention and international order after Afghanistan
2021-09-14"After each global convulsion, the world is flooded with ideas of how to make and manage what amounts to a new normal. The present confluence of COVID, climate change and the collapse of the West’s 20 years in Afghanistan is such a moment."
When they came for me: The hidden diary of an apartheid prisoner by John R Schlapobersky: a book review
2021-06-21"Accounts of imprisonment and torture under apartheid all too readily serve narrow political ends – but this book is the exception which proves the old rule. As such, this story will need to do much heavy lifting on that never-ending South African agenda of understanding and its twin, forgiveness."