Reconstructing the Third Wave of Democracy

Rita Kiki Edozie, Ph.D., is currently an Assistant Professor in International Relations at Michigan State University. She has held appointments as the Deputy Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and visiting assistant professor with the department of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware. She is the author of People Power and Democracy: The Popular Movement Against Military Despotism in Nigeria, 1989-1999. She has published 'Promoting African Owned and Operated Development: Reflections on the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD)' in African and Asian Studies and 'Third World Democracies: Learning From Each Other' in the ATWS-Journal of Third World Studies and has contributed book chapters to several edited volumes.

Since the 1990s, trends in African politics require the realization that the public policy practice and the theoretical analysis of 'democracy and democratization' are becoming increasingly important tenets for understanding the contemporary political science of the region. Reconstructing the Third Wave of Democracy explains these new political processes and ideas. Author Rita Kiki Edozie identifies factors that Africans have encountered since the foundation of the modern African state and presents a critical analysis of African politics through the lenses of post-colonial discourse by uniquely employing the ideas of democratic theory to guide an analysis of the Continent's democratic development and performance. Edozie presents an intra-regional comparative analysis of democratic politics in Africa in ways that few books on the same subject do for the continent. Her methodology for examining democracy in Africa reveals the dynamism of several country cases and several more regime experiences with democracy encountered from the post-World War II period to the current post-Cold War period.

1 Introduction: Re-representing Africa's Third Wave in Comparative Democratic Theory Chapter 2 Chapter 1: Africa in Democratic Waves: Theoretical Considerations and Issues Chapter 3 Chapter 2: The Meaning of Democracy in Africa: Ideas in Social Construction Chapter 4 Chapter 3: Establishing Modern Democracy: The Global Second Wave and De-colonization Chapter 5 Chapter 4: Africa's Third Wave of Democracy: From Post-World War II "Uhurus" to Post-Cold War "Sopis" Chapter 6 Chapter 5: Post-Cold War Pluralist Democracy: Freedom and Human RIghts in a Global Democratic Era Chapter 7 Chapter 6: Electoral Authoritarians and Delegative Democrats: Reconstructing Democratic Consolidation in Africa Chapter 8 Chapter 7: Democratic Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy: Democracy and Development 9 Conclusion: Predicting the Future for Democracy in Africa