This book discusses the failures of liberal democracy to overcome the structural and racist inequalities in post-Apartheid South Africa, and it presents hopeful outlooks on new ideas and forms of democracy in social movements in the MENA region.
Classical liberal democratic theory has provided crucial ideas for a still dominant and hegemonic discourse that rests on ideological conceptions of freedom, equality, peacefulness, inclusive democratic participation, and tolerance. While this may have held some truth for citizens in Western liberal-capitalist societies, such liberal ideals have never been realized in colonial, postcolonial and settler colonial contexts. Liberal democracies are not simply forms of rule in domestic national contexts but also geo-political actors. As such, they have been the drivers of processes of global oppression, colonizing and occupying countries and people, appropriating indigenous land, annihilating people with eliminatory politics right up to genocides. There can be no doubt that the West - with its civilizational Judeo-Christian idea and divine mission 'to subdue the world' - has destroyed other civilizations, countries, trading systems, and traditional ways of life and is responsible for the death of hundreds of millions of human beings in the course of colonizing the world from its Empires of trade through colonialism to settler colonialism and today's politics of regime change. The book discusses the settler colonial regime that Israel has established in Palestine while still claiming to be a democracy. It discusses the failures of liberal democracy to overcome the structural and racist inequalities in post-Apartheid South Africa, and it presents hopeful outlooks on new ideas and forms of democracy in social movements in the MENA region.
"This highly original volume does wonder in showing the dark side of liberalism and in documenting how democratic projects exist in adverse and repressive contexts, such as Palestine, Syrian Kurdistan, and Algeria. The legacies of settler colonialism impact the prospect for democratic rule in post-Apartheid South Africa but do not deter Palestinian, Kurdish, or Algerian steadfastness for self-governance. As one of the contributors argues, analyses of the relation between democracy and citizenship cannot ignore the countries outside of Europe. We cannot ignore the multifaceted impacts of settler colonial formations on democracy at large. An eye-opener for comparativists and political theorists."
Benoit Challand, Associate Professor of Sociology, The New School for Social Research
"This excellent collection of papers, with each presenting original arguments about the historical evolution of settler-colonialism in Palestine, before and since Oslo, is a must read. A required reading for anyone interested to learn about the founding myths of Israeli democracy and the realities of occupied Palestine."
Nur Masalha, Professor at the Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS University of London
