Rawls, liberal citizenship and the African postcolonial challenge

Abstract

In this thesis I set out to critically analyse how Rawls’s theory of political liberalism can be employed to enhance our understanding of citizenship in postcolonial societies. I open with an analysis of how Zimbabwe’s post-revolutionary dispensation instantiates ‘mortgaged citizenship’, a phenomenon that is also identified as the ‘postcolonial challenge’. This is followed by an elaboration of how a class of political elites has produced what I term ‘mortgaged citizenship’ whereby it makes demands of infinite gratitude for participating in the anti-colonial revolution. In this way, political elites have supplanted the democratic imaginary of the ordinary citizens. The analysis how Rawls’s political liberalism offers the conceptual resources for addressing the central challenges that confront both the analysis and exercise of citizenship in a postcolonial context. A critical evaluation of Rawls’s ideal theory is undertaken with the aim of not only to parse out the important lines of contestation that animate the ‘ideal/non-ideal theory’ debate but also to trace the theory’s main contours and arguing for their relevance to our attempts at re-thinking about the ‘non-ideal’ context. In this way, I interrogate the nature of ideal theory, its role in political theory and practice, and the possibilities it offers to the postcolonial world given the challenges that animate its politics. I proceed to undertake analysis of how ‘Rawls’s Hegel’ can be utilised to address the postcolonial challenge of mortgaged citizenship. In doing this, I seek to advance how political philosophy serves the task of reconciliation so that citizens can ‘feel at home in the world’ by embracing social and political institutions as contexts that avail possibilities for the full exercise of democratic citizenship. I argue that it is only when citizens ‘feel at home in the world’ that the postcolonial quest for stability can be achieved. This is done by critically evaluating how Rawls’s notion of stability can be used to analyse the institutions of the postcolonial world and the political forms of life to which these institutions give rise. Overall, the thesis argues that we can draw from Rawls’s political liberalism new and rich vocabulary for not only understanding why citizenship is Africa’s dominant postcolonial challenge but also for conceptualising how the effects of the postcolonial challenge can be effectively addressed.