Brown's focus on the growing mass mobilization of citizens through various civic associations, unions, and protest movements leads him to a cautious optimism about the future.
Foreign Affairs
Offers a novel philosophical and analytical base on which to analyse post-apartheid politics.
Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies
South Africa's Insurgent Citizens provides an innovative understanding ... Read moreof rising popular protest in the country today. The book shows how, despite growing repression, activists and communities are finding new ways to exert their rights to protest and political expression.
Gillian Hart, author of Rethinking the South African Crisis
Julian Brown's book offers us a rich and intriguing account of ourselves as a country of protest. His analysis is insightful, and ultimately hopeful - for it is only through principled challenges to the present, on the streets, in the halls of power, and in the courts, that our constitutional ideals of dignity and equality for all can be realised.
Justice Edwin Cameron, Constitutional Court of South Africa
A fascinating account of protest based on an unshrinking belief in the importance of an organised, strong, powerful, and vibrant civil society, particularly of poor people. Its controversial thesis is that the early abandonment of protest and settling with the state can retard the strengthening of civil society.
Justice Zak Yacoob, former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa
A timely and important analytical contribution to the growing scholarship on contemporary protest politics in South Africa. Brown both challenges existing analytical frameworks and offers innovative ways of thinking about protests.
Noor Nieftagodien, University of the Witwatersrand
Rooted in current South African case studies of community organisation, social protest and public interest litigation, this book makes an invaluable contribution to the literature on democratic politics. Beyond this, it offers a compelling vision of the possibilities of claiming justice from below.
Sandra Liebenberg, University of Stellenbosch
Whereas conventional readings of South African politics worry about a crisis of post-apartheid democracy, Brown offers a provocative argument that makes a welcome contribution to how we understand political agency among poor communities in South Africa today.
Thiven Reddy, University of Cape Town
Julian Brown writes that moments of political insurgency "can provide a lightning flash of illumination" into the inequalities of South Africa. His book is similarly revealing. He vividly analyses popular politics, insisting that the mobilisation of ordinary, insurgent citizens has and will impact on the shape of society and as yet unpredictable political outcomes.
William Beinart, University of Oxford
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