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The global movement toward democracy, spurred in part by the ending of the cold war, has created opportunities for democratization not only in Europe and the former Soviet Union, but also in Africa. This book is based on workshops held in Benin, Ethiopia, and Namibia to better understand the dynamics of contemporary democratic movements in Africa. Key issues in the democratization process range from its institutional and political requirements to specific problems such as ethnic conflict, corruption, and role of donors in promoting democracy. By focusing on the opinion and views of African intellectuals, academics, writers, and political activists and observers, the book provides a unique perspective regarding the dynamics and problems of democratization in Africa.
Questions surrounding democracy, governance, and development especially in the view of Africa have provoked acrimonious debates in the past few years. It remains a perennial question why some decades after political independence in Africa the continent continues experiencing bad governance, lagging behind socioeconomically, and its democracy questionable. We admit that a plethora of theories and reasons, including iniquitous and malicious ones, have been conjured in an attempt to explain and answer the questions as to why Africa seems to be lagging behind other continents in issues pertaining to good governance, democracy and socio-economic development. Yet, none of the theories and reasons proffered so far seems to have provided enduring solutions to Africa’s diverse complex problems and predicaments. This book dissects and critically examines the matrix of Africa’s multifaceted problems on governance, democracy and development in an attempt to proffer enduring solutions to the continent’s long-standing political and socio-economic dilemmas and setbacks.
This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the history of democracy in Africa and explains why the continent's democratic experiments have so often failed, as well as how they could succeed. Nic Cheeseman grapples with some of the most important questions facing Africa and democracy today, including whether international actors should try and promote democracy abroad, how to design political systems that manage ethnic diversity, and why democratic governments often make bad policy decisions. Beginning in the colonial period with the introduction of multi-party elections and ending in 2013 with the collapse of democracy in Mali and South Sudan, the book describes the rise of authoritarian states in the 1970s; the attempts of trade unions and some religious groups to check the abuse of power in the 1980s; the remarkable return of multiparty politics in the 1990s; and finally, the tragic tendency for elections to exacerbate corruption and violence.
The post-independence integration endeavor of the East African Community has been punctuated with challenges, culminating into the collapse of the 1967-1977 regional organization. The renaissance of the integration agenda since the re-establishment of the regional organization in 1999 has rekindled epistemological debate among scholars and practitioners on the East African Community raison d'etre and integration process. This volume is the first of its kind in this ongoing debate that puts into proper context the nexus between the East African citizens and the integration agenda. Focusing on the Partner States case studies, the authors of the chapters operationalize the concepts of popular participation, eastafricanness, eastafricanization, democratization, and integration. Using political, national constitutions and EAC treaty, communication and awareness dimensions the authors of the chapters have analyzed the nexus between the EACcitizens and the integration process. The study generally proceeds from the premise that the exclusion of the EAC citizens from exercising their sovereign rights through popular participation undermines the prospects for the institutionalization and consolidation of the EAC identity, eastafricanness, eastafricanization, democratization and integration.
Mobilizing for Democracy is an in-depth study into how ordinary citizens and their organizations mobilize to deepen democracy. Featuring a collection of new empirical case studies from Angola, Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, this important new book illustrates how forms of political mobilization, such as protests, social participation, activism, litigation and lobbying, engage with the formal institutions of representative democracy in ways that are core to the development of democratic politics. No other volume has brought together examples from such a broad Southern spectrum and covering such a diversity of actors: rural and urban dwellers, transnational activists, religious groups, politicians and social leaders. The cases illuminate the crucial contribution that citizen mobilization makes to democratization and the building of state institutions, and reflect the uneasy relationship between citizens and the institutions that are designed to foster their political participation.
A detailed account of politics in Ghana's urban neighborhoods, providing a new way to understand African democracy and development.
How do individual Africans view competitive elections? How do they behave at election time? What are the implications of new forms of popular participation for citizenship and democracy? Drawing on a decade of research from the cross-national Afrobarometer project, the authors of this seminal collection explore the emerging role of mass politics in Africa¿s fledgling democracies.
This book is a groundbreaking exploration of public opinion in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on the Afrobarometer, a survey research project, it reveals what ordinary Africans think about democracy and market reforms, subjects on which almost nothing is otherwise known. The authors find that support for democracy in Africa is wide but shallow and that Afrcns feel trapped between state and market. While Africans are learning about reform on the basis of knowledge, reasoning, and experience, few countries are likely to attain full-fledged democracies and markets anytime soonn.
A radical new approach to understanding Africa's elections: explaining why politicians, bureaucrats and voters so frequently break electoral rules.
"The country-specific chapters serve to underline the differences between African democracy and liberal democracy, yet some authors are at pains to emphasize that whatever their limitations, African democracies are an advance over what had gone before." -- African Studies Review