Democratic peace versus democratic conflict in Africa

Abstract

The roughly 50 years of Cold War between the Western bloc and the defunct Communist bloc was not just a bipolar struggle for ideological supremacy between the capitalist and socialist systems, it was also constructed by the victorious Western camp as a moral struggle between liberal democracy (canvassed as a universal good) and a godless form of totalitarian dictatorship (viewed as inherently evil). The West indisputably won the Cold War. Communism was vanquished and most of the former communist countries euphorically embraced capitalist economic reforms with its concomitance of liberal democracy.