About

Edward Ramsamy, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies and a member of the graduate faculty of Geography, as well as the graduate faculty of Urban Planning and Policy Development at the Bloustein School. His areas of specialization include international development planning and geographies of globalization. Dr. Ramsamy is the author of the book The World Bank and Urban Development: From Projects to Policy (Routledge, 2006). His research encompasses international development planning, the political economy of transition and nation-building in post-colonial and developing societies, and the comparative politics of identity and race relations in South Africa and the United States. He has edited works such as Science, Culture and the Politics of Knowledge: Contexts and Conversations (forthcoming) and The Black Experience in America (2006). Dr. Ramsamy has published numerous articles on regional integration in southern Africa, as well as racial, ethnic, and national identity in post-apartheid South Africa. He serves as Secretary and a Founding Trustee of the Global Literary Project, Inc., and has received fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, and the Institute for Research on Women.

Research topics

• Political science
• Geography
• Development economics
• Economic growth
• Political economy

Selected publications

• Negotiating Identity in Post-Settlement South Africa

  2018-02-19

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  This chapter focuses on some issues related to the challenges of nation-building in South Africa. It provides an overview of the African National Conference's (ANC) shifting position on the national question, paying particular attention to the ANC's stance before and after its unbanning in 1990. The chapter examines the challenges Zulu nationalism poses to the new political order in South Africa and the politics of ethno-nationalism among the Indian community. The ANC conceded to the potential power of ethnic mobilization around Zulu identity. The symbolic "Africanization" of the ANC, as exemplified in its overtures to the Zulus, has made it difficult for the ANC to gain the support of Indians, many of whom fear African political and cultural domination in a post-settlement era. The chapter highlights the dual challenge South Africa faces: overcoming socioeconomic inequality and building a collective sense of nationhood.

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• The International Community and Transformation in South Africa: From Protest to Engagement

  2016-03-10

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  The international campaign against racial segregation in South Africa was one of the most successful global solidarity movements of the 20th century. Rather than a singular movement, it was a loose, cross-national network of student activists, scholars, sportspersons, politicians, labor union leaders, religious figures, artists, musicians, and others that offered assistance to anti-apartheid resistance movements inside South Africa. The movement can be divided into two broad campaigns: 1) Efforts by national governments to provide diplomatic, military, and other logistical support to the liberation movements; 2) civil society efforts to support the resistance. For example, in 1946, the newly independent Indian state was the first to act officially against segregation by withdrawing its high commissioner from South Africa and unilaterally imposing sanctions against South Africa that same year. The Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries, as well as Cuba, provided military assistance to the African National Congress (ANC). The African countries of Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia provided military bases for the ANC. South Africa’s military defeat at the hands of Cuba in Cuito Cuanavale (Angola) in 1987-88 shook the confidence of the South African military. This humiliation was one of the reasons that South Africa withdrew from its occupation of Namibia and ventured toward a negotiated settlement with the liberation movements. The Scandinavian governments provided substantial financial assistance to the ANC.

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• The United Nations, Enuga Reddy and the Global Anti-Apartheid Movement

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2013-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The international campaign against apartheid was one of the most successful global solidarity movements of the 20th century. The aim of this paper is to overview the role United Nations in the global anti-apartheid movement and in particular the role of an international civil servant Enuga Reddy, whose coordination and vision as the prime mover within the Special Committee Against Apartheid of the United Nations created new political opportunities for anti-apartheid activists and enabled them to take advantage of contingent circumstances such that they could shift international opinion and the South African domestic political terrain against apartheid. Reddy worked against apartheid on one hand, by mobilizing within the UN to denounce South Africa and to increase the institution’s capacity to make firm resolutions against apartheid. On the other hand, he simultaneously maneuvered behind-the-scenes as a high-ranking official to carve out a vital transnational space for global anti-apartheid activists that would allow them to network and plan their next moves. The paper will show how Reddy’s efforts, over a 35 year career as a United Nations civil servant, had cascading consequences from the 1960s onwards that contributed to the eventual demise of apartheid.

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• A powerful and preoccupying factor in the history of the United States since its founding in the seventeenth century has been the matter of color. Echoing Du Bois' pronouncement at the beginning of

  2013-01-01

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• Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia, & Africa: An Encyclopedia

  2012-01-01 · 9 citations

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• Food: Prehistory to 1200: South, Central, and West Asia

  2012-01-01

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• The Black Experience in America

  2011-08-18 · 2 citations

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• BETWEEN NON‐RACIALISM AND MULTICULTURALISM: INDIAN IDENTITY AND NATION BUILDING IN SOUTH AFRICA

  Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie · 2007-09-01 · 43 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT The paper examines the rhetoric of nation‐building in South Africa with particular reference to the incorporation of South Africans of Indian descent into the post‐1994 political order. During its years as a protest movement, the ANC came to embrace ‘non‐racialism’, a doctrine emphasising a common South African identity, in order to provide a counter‐rhetoric to the racially exclusive doctrine of apartheid. However, the organisation had difficulty in garnering support from the Indian and Coloured communities during the transition to democratic rule. It increasingly adopted a multiculturalist conception of the South African nation and promoted the idea of the ‘rainbow nation’ in order to foster a sense of unity among South Africa's diverse population groups. This multicultural conception of the South African nation has met with some success. The majority of Indians voted for the ANC in the 2004 elections, shifting their political loyalties from the National and Democratic Parties in previous elections. This trend demonstrates an increasing identification among Indians with the African majority government. However, in spite of the ANC's success in courting the Indian vote in the 2004 elections, Indian‐African tensions have been fuelled by recent anti‐Indian rhetoric. The paper argues that a multiculturalism that does not address the material conditions that fuel class antagonisms will prove to be shallow in the present neo‐liberal policy climate.

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• World Bank and Urban Development

  2006-09-27 · 51 citations

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  As one of the world’s most powerful supranational institutions, the World Bank has played an important role in international development discourse and practice since 1946. This is the first book-length history and analysis of the Bank’s urban programs and their complex relationship to urban policy formulation in the developing world. Through extensive primary research, the book examines four major themes: the political and economic forces that propelled the reluctant World Bank to finally embrace urban programs in the 1970s how the Bank fashioned its general ideology of development into specific urban projects trends and transitions within the Bank’s urban agenda from its inception to the present the World Bank’s historic and contemporary role in the complex interaction between global, national, and local forces that shape the urban agendas of developing countries. The book also examines how protests from NGOs and civic movements, in the context of globalization and neo-liberalism, have influenced the World Bank policies from the 1990s to the present. The institution’s attempts to restructure and legitimate itself, in light of shifting geo-political and intellectual contexts, are considered throughout.

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• The world bank & urban programmes in Zimbabwe: A critical appraisal

  Review of African Political Economy · 2006-09-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The World Bank did not address urban issues for the first twenty-five years of its existence. However, a variety of political factors propelled the reluctant institution to address urban poverty in the early 1970s (Ayres, 1983; Ramsamy, 2006). The majority of the Bank's urban interventions during the 1970s concentrated on squatter upgrading and sites-and-services projects. While these programmes did have their problems, they represent the Bank's first attempt to address directly the needs of the urban poor, and offer them a framework to legitimise their rights to shelter and secure land tenure. By the mid-1980s, however, the Bank moved away from this approach and embraced a perspective that examined cities in their national macro-economic contexts. The Bank argued that the role of governments ought to be transformed from that of ‘providers’ of urban services, to that of ‘supporters’ or ‘enablers’ that serve as a liaison between the private sector and self-help groups (World Bank, 1991, 1993).

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Frequent coauthors

• Andrea L. Stanton

  University of Denver

  1 shared

• Carolyn Elliott

  University of Vermont

  1 shared

• Gayle T. Tate

  Rutgers Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

  1 shared

• Peter Seybolt

  1 shared

Labs

• Black Ecologies LabPI

Awards & honors

• Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council
• Fellowship from the Center for the Critical Analysis of Cont…
• Fellowship from the Institute for Research on Women