Deepening democracy in Africa

Democracy as zeitgeist has spawned a growth industry in the academy. Africa, once a source of inspiration for theory building for Western scholars,1 has largely passed ‘below the radar’ in current theoretical debates, even as a source of case study. Because of its indocility, it is assumed that Africa missed ‘the modernization train and was left stranded on the platform’. The implicit subtext here is that a lack of a cultural resonance explains the failure to modernize and modernization is posited as a precondition for democracy.2 This teleological argument, grounded in a unidirectional analysis that carries an American imprimatur was the orthodoxy in Political Science for a long time and it had a rich intellectual lineage.3 Allowing such a view to ossify into dogma would have been a tragic mistake for political theory, if not evidence of its hubris.4 It did not happen, not even in the case of Africa where some scholars were sceptical about the possibilities of democratization.5 Scholars who have challenged the validity of this orthodoxy have emphasized the importance of statecraft and political decisions6 while also arguing that countries can be ‘differently democratic’.7 This argument for agency that de-emphasized the importance of structural conditions was mainstreamed into the discipline of Political Science as democratic possibilism. It is against this backdrop that recent studies on the possibilities for democratization in Africa have been carried out.

Agency (philosophy) · Argument (complex analysis) · Democracy · Democratization · Epistemology · Expansionism · Orthodoxy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Skepticism · Social science · Sociology · Teleology · African cultural and philosophical studies · History · Law · Philosophy