Turning Points In African Democracy
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Turning Points in African Democracy
A team of scholars examine the radical political changes that have taken place since 1990 in eleven key countries in Africa. Radical changes have taken place in Africa since 1990. What are the realities of these changes? What significant differences have emerged between African countries? What is the future for democracy in the continent? The editors have chosen eleven key countries to provide enlightening comparisons and contrasts to stimulate discussion among students. They have brought together a team of scholars who are actively working in the changing Africa of today.Each chapter is structured around a framing event which defines the experience of democratisation. The editors have provided an overview of the turning points in African politics. They engage with debates on how to study andevaluate democracy in Africa, such as the limits of elections. They identify four major themes with which to examine similarities and divergences as well as to explain change and continuity in what happened in the past. Abdul Raufu Mustapha is University Lecturer in African Politics at Queen Elizabeth House and Kirk-Greene Fellow at St Antony's College, University of Oxford; Lindsay Whitfield is a Research Fellow at the Danish Institute of International Studies, Copenhagen.
African Democracy
Author: Thompson, Gardner
language: en
Publisher: Fountain Publishers
Release Date: 2016-04-17
The concepts of democracy and good governance have been at the centre of criticism of governments all over the world. What democracy entails, however, has never been agreed, most notably on the African continent. African politicians who have been criticised for reigning over 'undemocratic' regimes have insisted that the West judges them by criteria that don't apply to African circumstances. Is there such a thing as African democracy? Informed and intrigued by two events that happened in different eras, in different countries, Gardner Thompson has written an in-depth historical examination of the nature of 'imported' democracy as practised in the East African countries of Uganda, where he worked as a young History teacher in the 70s, Kenya and Tanzania. The events were the 1971 Amin capture of power from Milton Obote in Uganda, and the post-election violence that rocked Kenya in 2007/2008, pitting then incumbent Mwai Kibaki against his erstwhile colleague Raila Odinga, along what many read to be tribal lines. Dividing the book into three sections, Thompson treats democracy in the three former colonies from the perspectives of pre-independence (colonialism), the transition to independence, and governance since independence. Reflecting indigenous history, the colonial past and evolving culture, flawed but functioning forms of government have emerged in the three states.
Democratization in Africa: Challenges and Prospects
It is two decades since the ‘third wave’ of democratization began to roll across sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s. This book provides a very timely investigation into the progress and setbacks over that period, the challenges that remain and the prospects for future democratization in Africa. It commences with an overall assessment of the (lack of) progress made from 1990 to 2010, exploring positive developments with reasons for caution. Based on original research, subsequent contributions examine various themes through country case-studies, inclusive of: the routinisation of elections, accompanied by democratic rollback and the rise of hybrid regimes; the tenacity of presidential powers; the dilemmas of power-sharing; ethnic voting and rise of a violent politics of belonging; the role of ‘donors’ and the ambiguities of ‘democracy promotion’. Overall, the book concludes that steps forward remain greater than reversals and that typically, though not universally, sub-Saharan African countries are more democratic today than in the late 1980s. Nonetheless, the book also calls for more meaningful processes of democratization that aim not only at securing civil and political rights, but also socio-economic rights and the physical security of African citizens. This book was originally published as a special issue of Democratization