Identity, Conflict, & Liberation: Postcolonial Lessons on Democratic Backsliding

• In Event: Liberation, Domination, Resistance

Abstract

The “democratic recession” of the past several years has demonstrated the fallibility of Western liberalism and the political democracies that embody it. It has posed urgent questions about the nature of citizenship, equality, pluralism, and the relations of political regimes to economic ones. It has put into question the very possibility of long-term democratic governance in polities rife with social, ethnic, and economic division. While the urgency of these questions can appear startlingly new to those living and theorizing in the Global North, they are questions that have long animated the politics of postcolonial states. This study’s point of departure is the idea that it is in the former colonies that liberal democratic governance’s contradictions have been the sharpest, and that it is therefore within these places that issues associated with “democratic backsliding” have found their most rigorous theorization. This project will argue that, now that these contradictions have “come home to roost” – in a process that Achille Mbembe has identified as the “becoming African” of the world – it is to the theoreticians of the postcolonial world that we must turn to find remedy. Dealing primarily with Mbemebe’s concept of “brutalism” and theorization of “autochthony,” as well as the work of Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, Issa Shivji, and Samir Amin, I will argue that in seeking to theorize the particularity of the postcolonial political situation, these authors offer tangible solutions to some of the political impasses faced by the developed nations of the global center. Specifically, they offer a framework for dealing with the complexities of identity, one developed via the theorization of ethnic conflict, that can help work through the nuance of contemporary identity politics, distinguishing its emancipatory kernel from its often nationalistic and parochial iterations. As the border increasingly becomes the political symbol par excellence of our time, and the maintenance of whiteness in the U.S. and Europe demands every increasing violence, analyzing identity, nativity, and difference become essential tasks for the future of pluralistic liberal democracy. What emerges from the analytical work is a concept of democracy that extends beyond the sphere of the political into the social, beyond the confines of formal institutions into the living experience of the polity, and beyond the narrow world of elections into the broader sphere of political liberation. It is a concept of democracy as liberation-in-motion, one that challenges many of the norms and assumptions that have long undergirded Political Science’s conceptions of the subject––and one which might offer a real remedy to the dangers democratic governance currently faces.

Author

• Sam Goodson, CUNY Graduate Center