This roundtable is organized to draw upon intellectual resources from across the world, with the goal of reviewing issues in most geographic regions. This year of 2024 was one in which an exceptionally large number of countries are having or have held national elections including for example, South Africa, India, the USA, the UK, Mexico, Ghana, Mozambique, Senegal, Brazil, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan, Taiwan, Croatia, and Italy. The panel will compare developments regionally, based on electoral participation and outcomes, but also consider the extent to which elections were accepted and/or challenged. What issues were especially important in the elections, but also generated post-electoral conflict.
Speaker: Dr. Bernard Forjwuor
Democratizing African Democracy
The standardization, if also universalization, of the Euro-American model of democracy has subdued the possible development of diverse democratic traditions in Africa and, with it, the centering of Africa’s political history. Democratizing African democracy presupposes that democracy cannot exist except for the people that wills its legitimacy. And just as democracy cannot exist outside the will of the people, its content, orientation, performance, and augmentation must be directed, affirmed, or superseded only by the African people. Because Euro-American democratic pre-determination is a valorization of Euro-American political history over African political histories, when dictated, has led to the justification for the evacuation of the African democratic reality and experience in the formulation of democracy itself. Therefore, this paper offers a self-reflexive and self-formative political expression of how to consolidate democracy and its future sustainability in Africa. It opens the door for speculation, experimentation, augmentation, and supersession of the conventional democratic paradigms. This centering of African voices, in a radical sense, is a way of humanizing Africans who for centuries have been stripped of their histories, being, and knowledge systems through a perverse Hegelianism that entombs them in a perpetual childlike state of being only fit to be dictated to by a superior Euro-American civilization.
Speaker: Prof. Dianne Pinderhughes
Race, Gender and Class in The 2024 Presidential Elections in the USA
The 2024 Elections in the USA generated considerable uncertainty, excitement and in the final outcome, the return of Donald Trump to the Presidency. This paper will explore the factors that led to the re-election of Trump over Vice President Harris and consider several points. First what are the final election results. The early discussion has tended to emphasize that Trump won by a significant margin, calling it an electoral realignment. Second what are the partisan results for the popular vote, the electoral college vote for the President, the actual numbers for the US House of Representatives and for the US Senate. Third the paper will explore the voting results for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and analyze the proportions of support won by each candidate based on race and gender. Exit Polls which reported on the reasons voters made the choices they did will also be considered. How much political capital will Trump actually have. There were certainly shifts showing increased strength of the Republican Party in many geographic regions of the country, but is there any reason to conclude that the election represented a long term electoral realignment. Examination of outcomes by race, ethnicity, gender, of exit polls, and careful analysis of specific regions will be used to understand the outcome of the 2024 elections in the USA.