A familiar strain of Western political theory has long portrayed African states as inherently incapable of self-government—an outlook that endured both the rhetoric of colonial “civilizing missions” and the administrative experiments that accompanied them. Closely allied to this is a second assumption: that liberal democracy’s ideal citizen is culture-transcending—portable, universally legible, and reliably produced by institutions, regardless of historical injury. Postcolonial experience unsettles both premises. Colonial governance often entrenched hierarchy and extraction, and whatever civic capacities it claimed to cultivate were typically subordinated to the imperatives of rule. Against this backdrop of inherited structures, contested personhood, and uneven political formation, Professor George M. Carew—one of Sierra Leone’s foremost philosophers and diplomats—offers a bracing intervention in “Deliberative Democracy: Replacing Liberal Democracy in Postcolonial Africa” (Sierra Leone Writers Series, 2026).
Carew’s wager is not that Africa needs “more democracy” in the generic sense, but that the dominant template—liberal democracy as it is theorized, exported, and celebrated—often arrives with hidden assumptions that postcolonial societies cannot afford. As Professor Osman Gbla of the political science department of FBC observes, Carew interrogates liberal democracy by returning to the geography that produced it, the history that midwifed it, the homogeneity—sometimes coercive—that stabilized it, and the capitalism that helped market it as a near-universal cure for political development. That framing matters because it shifts the question from moral comparison (“Why can’t postcolonial states behave like ideal liberal states?”) to intellectual honesty (“What did liberal democracy require to become stable where it did, and what happens when those conditions are absent, distorted, or violently interrupted?”). Carew’s answer is unsparing: a theory that treats liberal democracy as destiny is conceptually thin, and a politics that installs it as a ready-made solution can be practically reckless.
The book begins with a genealogy of knowledge. Carew moves from Locke’s social contract to Rousseau’s distinction between the will of all and the general will—between aggregated private interests and the common good—while also engaging Hobbes and selected contemporary theorists to track the anxieties that made order, authority, and stability central to the Western political imagination. Liberal democracy’s ascent, in his telling, is not proof of universality but evidence of contingency: it emerged from particular languages, social conflicts, and institutional battles, and it later travelled the world in the company of power and prestige as much as persuasion. Read this way, “universal” can start to look less like a philosophical conclusion and more like a historical outcome.
From that diagnosis, Carew advances his core claim: the one-size-fits-all ambitions of liberal-democratic export are both politically risky and morally incomplete in postcolonial settings. No two societies share the same concrete experience; therefore, democratic theory must take culture seriously—not as decoration but as the terrain on which citizenship, duty, and legitimacy are negotiated. A crucial target is the idea of the culture-transcending individual, the supposedly neutral subject liberal democracy assumes at its center. Carew argues that this figure—abstract, egoistic, and “universally legible”—can become a weapon. It authorizes a kind of theoretical impatience with communities whose histories have made the civic self more contested: where belonging has been policed, authority has been experienced as predation, and “the state” is not automatically recognized as a moral project.
Carew is particularly compelling when he shows how liberal democracy’s global status is reinforced by an epistemic hierarchy: not only do some institutions count more than others, but some experiences count more than others. He treats the cross-cultural debate as more than a polite academic dispute about “fit.” For him, it is a hegemonic struggle over who gets to define political maturity and rationality in the first place. This is where his discussion of postcoloniality and postmodernity, situated within Eurocentric contexts, bites hardest: experience is coloured, devalued, and rendered suspect, while Western trajectories are quietly cast as the default biography of modern politics. One need not accept every emphasis of this critique to recognize its force. Carew is not pleading for cultural exceptionalism; he is demanding that democratic legitimacy be theorized with historical seriousness.
A second provocation follows: democracy should not be collapsed into the liberal state, or even comfortably paired with liberal society. Carew highlights what he sees as liberal society’s pote
Carew’s wager is not that Africa needs “more democracy” in the generic sense, but that the dominant template—liberal democracy as it is theorized, exported, and celebrated—often arrives with hidden assumptions that postcolonial societies cannot afford. As Professor Osman Gbla of the political science department of FBC observes, Carew interrogates liberal democracy by returning to the geography that produced it, the history that midwifed it, the homogeneity—sometimes coercive—that stabilized it, and the capitalism that helped market it as a near-universal cure for political development. That framing matters because it shifts the question from moral comparison (“Why can’t postcolonial states behave like ideal liberal states?”) to intellectual honesty (“What did liberal democracy require to become stable where it did, and what happens when those conditions are absent, distorted, or violently interrupted?”). Carew’s answer is unsparing: a theory that treats liberal democracy as destiny is conceptually thin, and a politics that installs it as a ready-made solution can be practically reckless.
The book begins with a genealogy of knowledge. Carew moves from Locke’s social contract to Rousseau’s distinction between the will of all and the general will—between aggregated private interests and the common good—while also engaging Hobbes and selected contemporary theorists to track the anxieties that made order, authority, and stability central to the Western political imagination. Liberal democracy’s ascent, in his telling, is not proof of universality but evidence of contingency: it emerged from particular languages, social conflicts, and institutional battles, and it later travelled the world in the company of power and prestige as much as persuasion. Read this way, “universal” can start to look less like a philosophical conclusion and more like a historical outcome.
From that diagnosis, Carew advances his core claim: the one-size-fits-all ambitions of liberal-democratic export are both politically risky and morally incomplete in postcolonial settings. No two societies share the same concrete experience; therefore, democratic theory must take culture seriously—not as decoration but as the terrain on which citizenship, duty, and legitimacy are negotiated. A crucial target is the idea of the culture-transcending individual, the supposedly neutral subject liberal democracy assumes at its center. Carew argues that this figure—abstract, egoistic, and “universally legible”—can become a weapon. It authorizes a kind of theoretical impatience with communities whose histories have made the civic self more contested: where belonging has been policed, authority has been experienced as predation, and “the state” is not automatically recognized as a moral project.
Carew is particularly compelling when he shows how liberal democracy’s global status is reinforced by an epistemic hierarchy: not only do some institutions count more than others, but some experiences count more than others. He treats the cross-cultural debate as more than a polite academic dispute about “fit.” For him, it is a hegemonic struggle over who gets to define political maturity and rationality in the first place. This is where his discussion of postcoloniality and postmodernity, situated within Eurocentric contexts, bites hardest: experience is coloured, devalued, and rendered suspect, while Western trajectories are quietly cast as the default biography of modern politics. One need not accept every emphasis of this critique to recognize its force. Carew is not pleading for cultural exceptionalism; he is demanding that democratic legitimacy be theorized with historical seriousness.
A second provocation follows: democracy should not be collapsed into the liberal state, or even comfortably paired with liberal society. Carew highlights what he sees as liberal society’s pote