Democracy and the Crisis of Legitimacy: Peace Formation and Failed State Building in Africa

Abstract

Advocates of democracy and democratically-governed societies believe that a country’s state of development is a function of the extent to which individuals and groups are able to partake in the decision-making processes which determine their livelihood and humanity. Africa remains the last continent to be freed from the shackles of colonialism and imperialism. The partition of Africa into different states or countries in a manner that showed little or no regard for ethnic, religious, cultural and political differences embedded the destructive seeds of failure in these countries. The wave of political and social crises in the post-independence era reflects the inherent nature of these salient factors. The principal objective of this paper is to examine the causal nexus between historical antecedent of external influences on Africa’s political, social and cultural structures, on one hand, and the failure of democratic state building in post independence Africa, on the other. The resilience of these pre-colonial differences and internecine conflicts clearly made state-building efforts in post colonial Africa complicated. Today, Africa is bedeviled with ethnic, religious and political crises in one country after the other on a perennial scale to the extent that a number of states in Africa had failed and are still failing. Democratic methods of state-building have failed and are failing in Africa. What factors are responsible? Who are chief actors, internal or external, responsible for this failure?  What theoretical tools of analysis are available for understanding the situation and to what extent has political authority been eroded by crisis of legitimacy?  This paper in its summation tries to identify possible leeway out of the complex state building problems facing African countries.

Keywords: democracy, state-building, legitimacy crisis, peace formation, institutions, actors.