Author Description

"Analyzing South Africa's political culture during the initial years of the country's experiment with democracy, Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa provides the first comprehensive study of intolerance ever conducted outside the developed world (and the first outside the United States in nearly twenty years). In a field so heavily dominated by research on stable democracies, this book is a refreshing reminder that political tolerance is crucial to successful democratic politics in every corner of the globe. The research of Gibson and Gouws creates a new agenda for the study of political tolerance by going far beyond simply reconsidering the questions normally investigated by scholars in the West. Instead, the overwhelming focus of this research is on change: how the tolerance and intolerance of South Africans respond to both short-term and long-term political, economic, and social forces. Thus, the emphasis of this book is not merely on what is in South Africa, but what might be as well."--Jacket.