Reimagining Democracy: Decolonizing the Colonial Spatial Fix

Reimagining Democracy: Decolonizing the Colonial Spatial Fix asks why and how the genealogies of colonial histories/policies/practices inform, hasten, and make possible the dismantling of democracies in Africa/Ghana. The project seeks to imagine a more robust democratic arrangement in contemporary Africa using the checkered history of democracy as the point for these reflections, meditations, and speculations. My methodology is a mixed approach combining archival sources, focus group and individual interviews, and theoretical/philosophical analyses/interventions to critically engage the current state of the democratic experiment and further speculate on its future trajectory/possibility. My objectives include conducting archival research on the colonial genealogies of the contemporary postcolonial democratic form in Ghana to account for the particular path that the present postcolonial political form took. These archival sources will include letters patent, colonial ordinances/constitutions, recorded deliberations of various legislative proceedings leading up to political independence, and accounts/debates/analyses of how the postcolonial political form was imagined/articulated in the media. Additionally, the upcoming 2024 election in Ghana offers a rare opportunity to observe, analyze, and conduct focus group/individual interviews about the coalescence of the colonial and their postcolonial revisions/iterations vis a vis the current wave of declining democratic institutions/cultures in the West African sub-region.