Full Description
Classical liberal democratic theory has provided crucial ideas for a still dominant and hegemonic discourse that rests on ideological conceptions of freedom, equality, peacefulness, inclusive democratic participation, and tolerance. While this may have held some truth for citizens in Western liberal-capitalist societies, such liberal ideals have never been realized in colonial, postcolonial and settler colonial contexts. Liberal democracies are not simply forms of rule in domestic national contexts but also geo-political actors. As such, they have been the drivers of processes of global oppression, colonizing and occupying countries and people, appropriating indigenous land, annihilating people with eliminatory politics right up to genocides. There can be no doubt that the West - with its civilizational Judeo-Christian idea and divine mission 'to subdue the world' - has destroyed other civilizations, countries, trading systems, and traditional ways of life and is responsible for the death of hundreds of millions of human beings in the course of colonizing the world from its Empires of trade through colonialism to settler colonialism and today's politics of regime change. The book discusses the settler colonial regime that Israel has established in Palestine while still claiming to be a democracy. It discusses the failures of liberal democracy to overcome the structural and racist inequalities in post-Apartheid South Africa, and it presents hopeful outlooks on new ideas and forms of democracy in social movements in the MENA region.
Contents
Introduction: A 'Master-Race Democracy': Myths and Lies of Western Liberal Civilization Part 1: Democracy as a Progressive Force and the Failure of Liberal Democracy 1. The Algerian Hirak: Citizenship, Non-Violence, and the New Movement for Democracy 2. Stateless Radical Democracy and Law in Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria 3. South Africa and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy: Settler-Colonial Modernity and a Dominant Friend-Enemy Conception of Politics Part 2: Palestine: Settler Colonialism and the Impossibility of Democracy 4. Israeli Conception of 'Peace' as Indirect Colonial Rule 5. The Struggle for Democratic Space Under Violent Settler Colonialism and Authoritarian Rule 6. Moving Mountains? Palestinian Claim Making from Oslo Onwards 7. Political Resistance and Contested Citizenship 8. Municipal Elections in Occupied Jerusalem: Why Do Palestinians Boycott? 9. How the Law of Return Creates One Legal Order in Palestine 10. The Discourse of Exceptionalism: Civil and Human Rights in Israel
