Laurence Piper is Professor and Head of the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape. With a Phd from Cambridge in 2000, he has published extensively on Zulu nationalism, the Inkatha Freedom Party and electoral politics in South Africa. His current research concerns new democratic theory and innovations, particularly new forms of participation in local governance and development in the global south.

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  Expert Advocacy for the Marginalised: How and Why Democratic Mediat...

  von Lieres, B & L , Piper

  IDS Working Paper, Number 364
  This paper looks to explore and interrogate an important component of successful public participation cases which we ...
  This paper looks to explore and interrogate an important component of successful public participation cases which we term ‘democratic mediation’. It is argued that, around the world, the practice of ‘democratic mediation’ is an increasingly common phenomenon in forms of engagement between citizens and public authority, which includes, but is not limited to the state as neo-liberal globalisation intersects with democratisation. This claim emerges from an analysis of a significant number of Citizenship Development Research Centre (CDRC) case-studies on recent forms of citizen participation in the global south. Further, despite some important differences, these forms of mediation share a common feature of activism by a relatively elite third party for the inclusion of the interests of marginalised groups in formal decision-making.
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  Popular Mobilisation, Party Dominance and Participatory Governance ...

  Piper, L & L, Nadvi

  In L Thompson & C Tapscott (eds) Citizenship and Social Movements: Perspectives from the Global South. London: Zed
  Due to copyright restrictions, we can only share the first three pages of this chapter online. The book can be ordere...
  Due to copyright restrictions, we can only share the first three pages of this chapter online. The book can be ordered from Zed Books at www.zedbooks.co.uk/citizenship or purchased at the IDS bookstore.
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  States of Mobilisation? A comparison of modes of interaction betwee...

  Thompson, L, Pant, M, Shankland, A, Favareto, A, Tapscott, C, Piper, L , Mohanty, R & VSP, Coelho

  African Centre for Citizenship and Democracy: Cape Town
  Democracy is considered the common ‘currency’ of state and civil society interaction in middle-economic-power sta...
  Democracy is considered the common ‘currency’ of state and civil society interaction in middle-economic-power states such as India, Brazil and South Africa. In fact the IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) link, as it is understood in international relations, is premised upon certain political and economic similarities between these three states in the South, not least their democratic political foundations.1 In this paper we are looking at the IBSA states from a citizen-centric point of view, embarking upon a comparative analysis of how states deal with citizens’ demands from within...