Visions and Practices of Democracy in Socialist and Post-Colonial States

This open access book explores how socialist and post-colonial states envisioned and practised democracy for themselves after the Second World War. While scholarship on democracy has tended to focus on Western political traditions, this book demonstrates that the alternatives to liberal parliamentary democracy were not only widely debated in the countries of the ’second’ and ’third’ world, but also put into practice. Contributing to a fertile area of research, this edited collection explores what democracy meant in socialist and post-colonial countries. The chapters focus on the period following the Second World War, when beliefs about democracy included the notion that popular sovereignty should extend beyond the nation-state, that social justice should be enhanced, and that working people were the true bearers of sovereignty. The thirteen chapters in this volume, written by an international team of scholars, examine countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, and adopt a wide array of methods, ranging from political and social history, social anthropology, and the history of political thought, in order to explore how various meanings and practices of democracy have shaped historical experiences and political order.

Ana Kladnik is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Maribor, Slovenia. Previously she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Graz, Austria (from 2023-2025). Her research examines modern European history, with a focus on the political and social transformation of the twentieth century. In previous years, Ana has worked at the Institute for Contemporary History in Prague, the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, the Technical University in Dresden, and the Institute for Contemporary History in Ljubljana. She was also a Visiting Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Liverpool. Ana is a co-editor of Making Sense of Dictatorship. Domination and Everyday Life in East Central Europe after 1945 (2022).