The principal research question in this project is to understand, through the use of interdisciplinary methodologies, the main challenges to democracy in South Africa. The overall theme of this project relates to conditions that promote or undermine democratic practice and institutions. Our objective is to provide an analysis that goes beyond conventional understandings of the consolidation of democracy. In this project we do not see democracy merely as an outcome of a long process of struggle, but rather as a process that is constantly challenged by contestations of identity, memory and heritage. These processes are not unique to any one country, so the project begins by providing a comparative analysis of the development of a democratic culture and institutions in Switzerland and South Africa in the longue durée.

South Africa’s transition to democracy in the last fifteen years has been hailed as a global example of a negotiated pact taking the country from racial apartheid and low-level civil war to a peaceful developing multi-cultural and developmental nation-state. Its diversity derives from a long history of often violent confrontation and interaction of indigenous and migrant communities characterized by conquest, interdependence and servitude within chronologically distinct and different colonial settings from the 17th Century onwards. Defined in the present as an ‘emerging economy’, South Africa’s mineral revolution made it an industrial capitalist state in the 20th century. This transformed its largely agricultural population into an industrial society, characterized by a racialised class system with deep inequalities rooted in a range of experiences, including slavery. The passage from segregation to apartheid ensured that the country’s emerging racial democracy, excluding most blacks (the term used to refer to people of African, Indian and mixed race decent) from access to equal opportunities in economy and society. At the same time it gave to all whites (first men and later women) the full privileges of citizenship within a class-based society.

The democratic transition of the 1990s was the consequence of a bitter armed struggle over 30 years, and an even longer tradition of racial confrontation. But this transition has not overcome the consequences of the deep divisions in society, either in terms of wealth distribution or the capabilities that accompanied racial exclusion, despite the new state’s commitment to notions of equality and equal citizenship. The present discursive formation of a new South African ‘Rainbow’ Nation is also highly contested, with popular struggles at local levels challenging the nature of deliberative democracy, while generational tensions reflect some of the difficulties in integrating the nation-state.

What emerges from these local struggles and contestation with local government, are different notions of democracy nurtured by popular expectations. For instance forms of populist democracy, mobilizing around ‘big’ men, jostle with demands for more participatory forms of direct representation and more conventional ideas of liberal models of representative democracies. This raises the question of whether the forms of representative and deliberative democracy at all three tiers of government in South Africa, local, provincial and national, offers the political space for political participation of the electorate.

The project seeks to explore some of these contentions through specific case studies in different locales in South Africa within the overarching framework of the central question – challenges to democracy.