Democratizing or Reconfiguring Predatory Autocracy? Myths and Realities in Africa Today
Myths and Realities in Africa Today
Publication Year: 2009
Published by: African Books Collective
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
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pp. 6-7
Dedication
Preface
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pp. ix-x
Despite the explosion of multi-party elections since the 1990s democratic development and political stability have proved elusive in Africa. The greatest defect of African multiparty elections is that they address the symptoms of the African predicament rather than...
Chapter One - Introduction
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pp. 1-4
The debate about the scope and the promise of capitalist democracy (liberal democracy) has been reignited by the African experience of democratization in the 1990s. This could hardly be more welcome in a continent where the authoritarian imprint of capitalism has...
Chapter Two - Democracy: Why Myths and Realities in Africa?
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pp. 5-10
There is a foggy zone in what is called democracy in Africa today. Most regimes today are neither clearly democratic nor fully authoritarian. They inhabit the wide and foggy zone between liberal democracy and closed authoritarianism. To order this universe of...
Chapter Three - Why is Democracy a Contested Global Construct Today?
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pp. 11-14
I shall start by insisting that education for democracy requires dialogical, authentic learning rather than the commodification of uniform, standardized knowledge and its acquisition touted by those marketizing education primarily for economic purposes. With this observation in mind, I shall call upon educators and university...
Chapter Four - Analytical Framework
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pp. 15-26
We will primarily survey the contested centre of the continuum, the boundary between electoral democracies and electoral authoritarianism. It starts from the assumption that a coherent set of minimal democratic norms exists that any democratic regime...
Chapter Five - Democracy in Africa Today: A Historical Overview
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pp. 27-30
Democracy is not a Western import. Rather, it is a universal, intrinsically woven principle that offers the conditions for human beings to achieve their maximum potential. Transparency (access to knowledge and information), participation, instruments of dialogue, effective monitoring institutions, bottom-up approaches...
Chapter Six - Pluralist Elections and Ideological Complementarity
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pp. 31-34
Electoral authoritarian regimes neither practice democracy nor resort regularly to naked and barbaric repression. By organizing periodic elections they try to obtain at least a semblance of democratic legitimacy, hoping to satisfy external aid donors as well as internal...
Chater Seven - Neoliberalism, Stagnation and Killing of Democracy
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pp. 35-50
Neoliberalism is not able to provide an institutional framework for sustained global capital accumulation. Neoliberalism undermines and dismantles the institutions set up to stabilize the capitalist economy and alleviate capitalist social contradictions. The capitalist...
Chapter Eight - Essential Elements of Democracy
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pp. 51-54
Democracy as a form of government always has the following
characteristics:
• there is a demos, a group which makes political decisions
by some form of collective procedure. Non-members of
the demos do not participate. In modern democracies the...
Chapter Nine - Political Legitimacy and Democratic Culture
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pp. 55-60
All forms of government depend on their political legitimacy, that is, their acceptance by the population. Without that, they are little more than a party in a civil war, since their decisions and policies will be resisted, probably by force. Apart from those with anti-statist objections, such as anarchists and libertarians, most people are...
Chapter Ten - Summary and Conclusion
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pp. 61-64
The greatest defect of African multiparty elections is that they address the symptoms of the African predicament rather than its structural causes in terms of explaining the structural roots of the crisis of politics, power, and production. Inefficiency, waste...
Chapter Eleven - Towards Social Democracy in Africa
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pp. 65-74
Social democracy, historically, is a term that has been used by individuals on both the far and moderate left to describe their beliefs, but in recent years the latter have embraced the term almost exclusively (indeed radical left-wing critics often use the term...
References
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pp. 75-80
Back Cover
E-ISBN-13: 9789956715633
Print-ISBN-13: 9789956558575
Page Count: 90
Publication Year: 2009
