This book offers readers an alternative history of the origins of the discipline of International Relations. Conventional, western histories of the discipline point to 1919 as the year of the ‘birth of the discipline’ with two seminal initiatives – setting up of the first Chair of IR at Aberystwyth and the founding of the Institute of International Relations on the side-lines of the Paris Peace Conference. From these events, International Relations is argued to have been established as a p...

A multidisciplinary analysis of how state capture unfolded in South Africa and was contested within both civil society and the state itself. It presents a scholarly and empirical understanding of how things went awry, even with various regulating bodies in place, and how to prevent state capture from happening again in the future.The metaphor of ‘state capture’ has dominated South Africa’s political discourse in the post-Zuma presidency era. What is state capture and how does it ma...

This book presents the outcomes of the special sessions of the 16th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence 2019, a forum that brought together ideas, projects and lessons associated with distributed computing and artificial intelligence, and their applications in various areas.Artificial intelligence is currently transforming our society. Its application in distributed environments, such as the internet, electronic commerce, environmental moni...

International relations are what a government does when nobodys looking. While this may well once have been true, the conduct of international relations in South Africa and elsewhere has come under increasing scrutiny by the public. This is partially the result of specialist expertise around the formal study of international relations and the making of foreign policy, enhanced by the development of International Relations as a separate academic field. Like the growth of institutes of inter...

This book questions the accepted origins of the field of International Relations (IR). Commonly understood to have emerged from the horrors of WW1 with the goal of bringing about world peace, the authors argue that on the contrary, IR came from a somewhat less noble tradition – that of the Round Table.The Round Table were a network of imperialists emerging in the late 1800s across five key British imperial societies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and India. Their aim...

“While floating down on the ice-floe, in the midst of dirt and darkness, hungry and cold… I wondered at myself that I could have learned, in a few short months, to have eaten such things, and submitted to such practices, as but few civilized persons have ever been called to endure.”In June of 1871, navigator George E. Tyson and the Polaris sailed forth from New York to pursue an American dream—to be the first expedition to explore the icy waters of the North Pole. Led by C...

At the age of 13 Sidney Kidman ran away from home with only five shillings in his pocket. He went on to become a horse dealer, drover, cattle buyer and bush jockey and he also ran a coach business. Above all Kidman created a mighty cattle empire of more than a hundred stations, fighting droughts, bushfires, floods and plagues of vermin to do so. His enterprise and courage won him a huge fortune and made him a legend.