Reginald Oduor, University of Nairobi, Kenya
Reginald M.J. Oduor, Ph.D.,University of Nairobi, Kenya will present an African critique of liberal democracy. Despite the end of the Cold War and the ascendancy of liberal democracy, several Western scholars and political activists have pointed to its inherent weaknesses. Furthermore, while it is also often considered to be the panacea for Africa’s political instability, liberal democracy is actually alien to Africa, having arisen out of the peculiar social, economic and political developments in Western Europe. Drawing from Recent African scholarship, this paper advances the view that the imposition of liberal democracy on post-colonial African states has stifled the growth of models of democracy that draw from indigenous African political thought and that are therefore more in line with the worldviews of the vast proportion of the populations of these polities. This situation also amounts to the ongoing political subjugation of such populations and the inhibiting of healthy intercultural political dialogues on a global scale.