ABSTRACT
Domestic and international momentum behind democratization has yielded a handful of apparently sustainable democracies and partial democracy in many more, but thereafter steady, if generally incremental democratic decline overall since about 2005, leaving in its wake resurgent authoritarian behavior as well as continued, if not increased corruption and patronage politics. A challenging stream of scholarship, represented in this book by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, has continued to find in these patterns a deeper underlying “strong imperviousness to de-imperialization,” tempered by, but not to be mistaken for, “de-westernization.” Though the frailty of African countries in respect of worsening environmental trends has been well known at least to many scholars and practitioners for the entirety of Africa’s first decades of independence, it has exploded as an issue of urgency for Africa as it has worldwide, especially over the first decades of the 21st century.
