Hermeneutic phenomenology of democratic power in Africa: The case of Ghana over the Longue Durée

Nene Lomotey Kuditchar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

The assumption of sovereign statehood in Africa coincided with the post- WWII second wave of democracy as identified by Samuel P. Huntington. Even though by the late 1970s and early 1980s the African state and its republican orders had run into an acute crisis, the continent by 1989 with the end of the Cold War (said to have triggered a third democratic wave) seems to have gained the confidence to have another go at democratic government. As evidence of this, for instance, the African Union with its "African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance" (ADC), sought to bind its member states to the tenets of liberal governance by making the practice of democracy the main criterion for admission. This notwithstanding, there is the general perception that the third democratic wave has long ebbed on the continent with all its inherent promises. The continent's democratic systems, inter alia, are said to be plagued by debilitating traits such as opaque party financing schemes, ultra-political party power contestations, constitutional coup d'états, "constitutions without constitutionalism", and the specter of presidential third termism, among others. Such gloomy perspectives which dominate scholarly thinking on democracy in Africa tend to exhibit a disregard for the broad idiosyncrasies of the continent's history, contextual dynamics, the rational strategic calculations of its actors, and the extent to which such traits affect democratic power contestations for that matter. In other words, scholars tend to avoid posing sympathetic, direct context-specific questions and in the process proffer conclusions which does not border on the treatment of democracy as a quintessential political phenomenon, how it has evolved within the continent's strictures of historical enablers as well as constraints and the iterated experiences, dynamics of transactional negotiations of the continent's actors among others. Consequently, such analysis and conclusions, tend to suffer from ahistorical anodyne insights which are often prosecutorial assessments with disinterest in the deep-seated, contingently dictated interests of African political actors. This chapter departs from such conventional approaches to the study of democracy in Africa by employing the tenets of hermeneutic phenomenology and the method of path-dependent process tracing to interrogate the "longue durée" historical experience of Ghana from 1951 to 1992 to probe the evolutionary dynamics of its democracy and by that seek to illuminate hitherto unattended features which when considered can reset the debate on the power undercurrents of African democratic politics at large.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationExplaining Phenomenology
PublisherNova Science Publishers, Inc.
Pages51-93
Number of pages43
ISBN (Electronic)9798886972078
ISBN (Print)9798886971910
Publication statusPublished - 25 Aug 2022

Keywords

  • Africa
  • Democratic power
  • Ghana
  • Hermeneutic phenomenology
  • Longue durée

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