Chapter 6 bridges the gap between the apartheid years and the post-apartheid majority government under ANC rule. Following the signature of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the saga of South Africa’s nuclear weapons programme was far from over, as the government still had to conclude a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). I illuminate how the nuclear sector inherited from the apartheid era was scaled down under the first democratic government. In addition, yet another leftover from the apartheid past continued to make headlines well into the second decade of the new millennium: the highly enriched uranium (HEU) in the hands of the South Africans remained an irritating issue from an US non-proliferation policy point of view. By looking at the government’s nuclear policies under ANC majority rule, I reveal that the Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma administrations were not receptive to US incentives to sell South Africa’s remaining HEU to Washington. However, from the US State Department’s perspective, this could have decreased the danger of proliferation.

Today the average lifespan in the US approaches 80 years old. However, the average health span—the number of healthy years we live—is much shorter. In the US it is 63 years old. This means we are living much longer than we are healthy. Disparity in health span is substantial in the US. The most privileged have a health span that approaches their lifespan. We must ensure that everyone has the opportunity to match their health span to their lifespan. Offering realistic guide posts on what to expect with normal aging. Crucial to put aging well at the center of policy internationally to harness the power of older people and move forward globally.

This chapter explores the place of compromise in transitional justice. While all-pervasive in politics, compromise is a neglected topic, almost a non-topic, within the current transitional justice literature. The chapter is an attempt to reverse this tendency and rehabilitate the notion of compromise. If, as pluralists hold, we are often faced with cases of hard moral choices where, whatever we do, something of value is irreparably lost, then the best we can hope for is some kind of acceptable compromise between clashing goods. The question about the limits of compromise thus features centrally in this chapter. How far should transitional societies go in their willingness to compromise? When is a compromise acceptable, fair, guided by principle, and when is it rotten to the core, simply illegitimate? To what extent is it acceptable to compromise deeply held values such as justice and truth for the sake of other equally important values such as, say, civil peace and democracy? While doubtful that we can settle such issues once and for all, the chapter identifies a range of questions that should be part of the collective conversation about when a political compromise is acceptable and when it is not. The discussion begins, however, with a concrete historical figure, the communist leader Joe Slovo, who played a critical role in South Africa’s negotiated transition from apartheid to democracy. Slovo’s reflections on the nature and limits of compromise in the South African context serve as a central reference point for my discussion throughout this chapter.

There has been a marked increase in incidents of terrorism – and correspondingly a growth in the study of terrorism – in Africa over the last twenty years or so. Yet a brief survey of the phenomenon in historical context reveals that terrorism in Africa has long been both complex and prevalent. There is clearly novelty, in the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, in terms of external linkages, ideologies and technology at terrorists’ disposal; this is true of both state and non-state actors. However, it is clear enough that some patterns of terrorist activity can be discerned as flowing from Africa’s deeper past. Therefore, it is important to see terrorism, in its historical and its contemporary forms, as part of the totality of violence in Africa. Connected to that, terrorism cannot be removed from the socio-economic and political conditions within which it takes place. Africans have considerable experience of state terrorism – from the slave trade and the state-building exercises of the precolonial era, to imperial partition, to the brutal excesses of authoritarian systems in the recent past. Marginalised, subjugated or otherwise dispossessed communities have sought to curtail these projections of power and resist, using whatever tools available. Terrorism cannot be segregated from wider contingencies – most obviously, economic and political aspiration and desperation, which fundamentally shape attitudes towards human life, or more precisely the taking of it, at particular moments in time.

If war seems fantastic, does this remove all forms of violent resistance? This chapter argues that it does not. It examines the case for armed struggle against global poverty in the form of terrorism and sabotage. It recognises the intuitive repugnance of terrorism, but argues that we cannotbegin from definitions of political violence that are already moralised. If terrorism and sabotage are directed at agents that are not ordinarily legitimate targets, there needs to be a strong justification as to why they are liable to violence. It is argued that there whether one thinks the average citizen in the Global North is responsible, vicariously liable, or innocent there is not a case for subjecting them to terroristic violence. However, when it comes to sabotage, the arguments against a full prohibition do not work. Violent disruption of the transnational system may be permitted if it does not target the lives of innocent people. This does not amount to a blank cheque as there will usually be strong pragmatic reasons to abstain from violence, such as the necessary cooperation to build human rights respecting institutions.