This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Racial Gaze Violence Race and Class The Postcolonial State.

Introducing the Democracy Project -- From oligarchy to democracy -- From democracy to tyranny -- Revisiting classical democracy through Aristotle's eyes -- From the state of nature to society: the commonwealth -- John Locke and modern liberal democracy -- John Locke and the state of nature -- John Locke on government -- Jean Jacques Rousseau on the social contract -- The general will and the social contract -- The origin of inequalities -- David Hume on the social contract -- James (...) Madison and the Federalist -- Democracy as checks and balances -- Immanuel Kant on republicanism -- Hegel on the state: an introduction -- Hegel on the ethical state and the idea of law -- Marx on socialist democracy -- Marx on the state and pure democracy -- Alexis de Tocqueville: democracy in America -- Democratic values -- John Rawls and contemporary liberal democracy -- Participatory democracy -- Passion for justice and freedom -- Radical democracy: vision and morality. (shrink)

This volume presents a theoretical defense of the potential of ordinary individuals to construct values and through them to become self-empowering, responsible ...

This book argues that anatomy and biology frame our gender, sex, and class, but they do not decide our possibilities. Our life-styles are our own constructions and expressions of self-definition. Teodros Kiros supports his argument by a careful reading of the literature from both the Global South and Global North that spans figures, works, and eras from antiquity to our late modern present.

In a period in which the concept of self‐determination has become a cliche, it seems astonishing that it occupies the center of the historical stage in the various searches for a community in the horn of Africa. Thus, the concept itself might indeed have been a cliche, but not for the millions of human beings that have sacrificed, and continue to sacrifice, their lives for the sake of a way of life that the concept promises.