Cultural Capital and Prospects for Democracy in Botswana and Ethiopia
This book focuses on and examines the impact of cultural capital, political economy, social movements, and political consciousness on the potential development of substantive democracy in Botswana and Ethiopia. While explaining the challenges, obstacles, and opportunities for the development of democracy, Cultural Capital and Prospects for Democracy in Botswana and Ethiopia engages in defining democracy as a contested, open, and expanding concept through a comparative and historical examination. The books analysis employs interdisciplinary, multidimensional, comparative methods and critical approaches to examine the dynamic interplay among social structures, human agencies, cultural factors, and social movements. This comparative and historical study has required an examination of critical social history that looks at societal issues from the bottom up: specifically critical discourse and the particular world system approach, which deal with long-term and large-scale social changes.
Cultural Capital and Prospects for Democracy in Botswana and Ethiopia will be of interest to scholars and students of African politics, political theory, and democratization.
Asafa Jalata is Professor of Sociology and Global and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
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4 Mauritanias Colonels
Political Leadership, Civil-Military Relations and Democratization
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5 The Rwenzururu Movement in Uganda
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6 South Sudan
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Edited by Amir Idris
7 Institutional Legacies, Decision Frames and Political Violence in Rwanda and Burundi
Stacey M. Mitchell
8 Aid Relations and State Reforms in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
The Politics of Mutual Accommodation and Administrative Neglect
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9 African Presidential Republics
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10 Cultural Capital and Prospects for Democracy in Botswana and Ethiopia
Asafa Jalata
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First published 2019
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2019 Asafa Jalata
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ISBN: 978-0-367-22853-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-27718-4 (ebk)
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Dedicated to Qeerroo/Qarree and others who have sacrificed themselves for abba biyyummaa and democracy.
My desire for and commitment to social justice and freedom have inspired me to write this comparative book, which delves into complex cultural, economic, political, and ideological issues in Botswana, Oromia, and Ethiopia in relation to the development of democracy. I believe that human freedom cannot be achieved without democracy. Of course, democracy is not a simple conceptit is contested, open, and expanding as it challenges the knowledge and ideology of domination and exploitation. As the histories of many countries, such as the United States and South Africa, demonstrate, democracy did not eliminate racial slavery, colonialism, and apartheid for many centuries. Only the struggles of the oppressed peoples, women, and classes expanded democracy in the United States after the 1960s and in South Africa after 1991.
This book also explores how the principles and practices of democracy have emerged in different parts of the world since ancient times to demonstrate the contested and expanding meaning of democracy. Specifically, the cases of Athenian democracy in Europe and Oromo democracy in Africa are discussed in this book to show this reality and to challenge the idea that democracys origin is only in the West. Although the book mainly focuses on Botswana and Ethiopia, the issue of democracy is explored from a global perspective to illustrate the development and evolution of democracy.
The issues of freedom and democracy are practical and personal for me. I was born, raised, and educated until college in the Ethiopian Empire in which the Oromo and other ethnonations have been suffering under the yoke of colonialism, dictatorship, ignorance, famine, and poverty; these various peoples have faced severe social oppression, economic exploitation, cultural destruction, political authoritarianism, state terrorism, and gross human rights violations. When I was a high school and college student, I was involved in a student movement and later in the Oromo national movement, which resulted in my political exile. Successive racialized/ethnocratic Ethiopian state elites under the leadership of Amhara or Tigrayan ruling elites and their collaborators from other ethnonations have failed to introduce fundamental social changes that could have transformed the empire into a genuine multinational federal democracy.
The revolutions of 1974 and 1991 did not succeed in empowering the people to bring about democracy, and such failed revolutions produced the authoritarian-terrorist governments of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam from 1974 to 1991 and Meles Zenawi and his party, called the Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), from 1991 to 2018. Similarly, the revolutionary ruptures that emerged between 2015 and 2018, which were led by the Qerroo/Qarree (Oromo youth) movement, have been facing a series of challenges because the youth movement did not develop the institutional and organizational capacity that could have fundamentally transformed the society by establishing a democratic state and an egalitarian multinational federal democracy.
Despite the fact that the EPRDF reorganized itself under the leadership of the reformist Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in April 2018 due to the push of revolutionary upheavals from below, I am not yet sure whether a genuine democracy will emerge as promised. The successive Ethiopian state elites have butchered thousands of people and imprisoned, tortured, maimed, and raped in the name of so-called socialism or so-called revolutionary democracy. Unfortunately, Prime Minister Abiy has already started to order the EPRDFs army and police to suppress the Oromo Liberation Army in Southern, Central, and Western Oromia, and to kill Oromo civilians, including women, elderly, and children. Of course, these actions undermine the promises he made when he came to power; he promised to protect human rights and to peacefully transition Ethiopia to democracy in 2020.
