Democracy and Democratization in Africa: Interrogating Paradigms and Practices

Abstract

Democracy is contextually and historically determined. This in turn makes concepts and paradigms in the democratic discourse to be contentious. To unravel this controversy we need to revisit the historical struggles of the peoples of a particular society. This article interrogates the historical and socio-economic basis of models of liberal democracy and its variants in imperial centers. It also examines war and violence by the West as the driving forces towards imposing the hegemony of liberal democracy over the Rest. At the final analysis, the article questions the practices and feasibility of liberal democracy in Africa and proposes an alternative model with three basic ingredients namely, popular livelihoods, popular participation and popular power.