South Africa and the crisis of liberal democracy

This chapter interprets liberal democracy in South Africa through the lens of settler-colonial society. Because generated from a violent history of a colonizer-colonized relationship, a Schmittian conception of politics dominates the pre-1994 struggle against Apartheid-racism where recognition and personal sacrifice were valued. This conception of the political splits in the post-1994 period. The political elite instrumentally draws upon a ‘friend-enemy’ discourse for electoral mobilizational politics, while the subaltern continues with the ‘pre-1994 struggle’ to obtain citizen recognition and access to material goods. This chapter draws on Fanon, Schmitt, and Arendt to explain the troubled state of the South African liberal democratic project.