Democracy in Trouble Globally: How is SADC faring?
For more than a decade, eminent political scientists have been warning that democracy is on the decline (Diamond 2008; Carothers 2002; Levitsky & Way 2002). The so-called “Third Wave” in democracy, coined by Samuel Huntington (Huntington 1991), seemed to be rolling back, and the gains of the first decades after 1990 are disappearing fast. The concerns are even about the status of the oldest democracies, the United States and the United Kingdom (Levistsky & Ziblatt 2018: Grayling 2018; Fukayama 2014). It is not axiomatic that democracy, once established, will survive – the recent decade suggests this – and all look considerably worse in the context of the Ukraine crisis and the deepening fracture of the international world order and the consolidating of hegemonic powers. Perhaps we have all been blithely ignoring the fact that, whilst a possible moral power exists in the United Nations, the reality is that the international order is, and always has been anarchic and at the whim of great powers (Mearsheimer 2001).
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