Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria: The Failure of the First Republic

Diamond, Larry

ISBN 10: 0815624220 / ISBN 13: 9780815624226

Published by Syracuse University Press (edition First Edition), 1988

About this Item

It's a preowned item in good condition and includes all the pages. It may have some general signs of wear and tear, such as markings, highlighting, slight damage to the cover, minimal wear to the binding, etc., but they will not affect the overall reading experience.

Seller Inventory # 0815624220-11-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria: The Failure of the First Republic
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press (edition First Edition)
• Publication Date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0815624220
• ISBN 13: 9780815624226
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

<p>The overthrow in January 1966 of Nigeria’s First Republic erased what had been regarded as perhaps the most promising prospect for liberal democracy in post-colonial Africa. Marking the sweeping failure of parliamentary institutions across a continent of new nations, it accelerated the slide into a ghastly civil war.<br><i>Class, Ethnicity and Democracy</i> is the first scholarly study to analyze the evolution, decay, and failure of Nigeria’s First Republic and to weigh this crucial experience against theories of the conditions for stable democratic government. Rejecting explanations that focus on political culture, political institutions, or ethnic competition and conflict, Larry Diamond identifies the root of Nigeria’s democratic failure in the interrelationship between class, ethnic and state structures. This led the emergent dominant class in each region to mobilize and exploit ethnicity and to trample the democratic process in furious competition for state control, since that control was the primary means for accumulating wealth and consolidating class dominance.<br>Tracing the polarization of conflict and the erosion of legitimacy through five major crises, Diamond presents a new methodology for analyzing the persistence and failure of democracies and points to the relationship between state and society as a crucial determinant of the possibility for liberal democracy.</p>

About the Author

Larry Diamond is Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He was previously Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University and Fulbright Visiting Lecturer in Sociology at Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria. He has published numerous articles on Nigerian politics and development in various learned journals, is the author of <i>Nigeria in Search of Democracy</i> and editor (with Juan Linz and Seymour Marin Lipset) of the four-volume study <i>Democracy in Developing Countries</i>.