Beschreibung
As organized groups took to the streets in a large number of
the sub-Saharan states beginning in the late 1980s in
protest against both the precarious socioeconomic conditions
and the stifling one-party state apparatus prevalent in the
region, this unprecedented mass discontent appeared set to
herald the dawn of a new political era by foreing a shift
from authoritarianism towards democracy. The unfolding
events were welcomed and supported by the international donor
dommunity eager to further extend the frontiers of
liberalism.
This book focusses on these processes of political reform in
a representative group of sub-Saharan states where the
democratization process has proved to be innovative,
mediocre, chaotic, and highly deceptive as the case may be.
By capturing these processes as an intra-elitist struggle
for political power, the book underscores the significance of
each strategy of democratization, the calculations which
underlie the pressures for and the resistance to reform as
well as the methods of expressing these as were made evident
in the moves by all the major political players. Above all,
the external inputs into this democratization and their
conditionality are analyzed in the light of both their
underlying interests and the outcomes of this politicized
reform process.