As liberal democracy increasingly fails to prevent the violence its own ideals are meant to discipline, the world needs what Africa already knows.

The world is at war again. Some of these wars are declared. Most are not. They run as economic coercion, sanctioned starvation, supply chain capture, proxy intervention and the steady weaponisation of distraction.

Across the globe, including Africa, the language of democracy continues to be spoken with confidence, yet the institutions of liberal democracy increasingly fail to prevent the violence that its own ideals are meant to discipline. 

On Africa Day on 25 May, it is worth asking why.

Liberal democracy contains a structural problem that its defenders rarely acknowledge. It is a procedural system for organising competition. It legitimises decision-making through votes, allocates power through representation and constrains its exercise through institutions. These are real achievements. But liberal democracy assumes that the substance of politics is the contest between rival interests and that institutions exist to manage that contest fairly. It does not, on its own, ask what those interests should be, or whether the contest itself is the problem.

Under conditions of capital, this procedural neutrality becomes a structural commitment. The contest is governed by profit, and those with the most capital write the rules. And the logic of profit is, finally, a zero-sum logic: my gain is structurally tied to someone else’s loss. When this logic operates at the scale of states and corporations, the people who lose are not abstractions. They are populations.

Ongoing wars and conflicts – economic and military – are not aberrations of liberal democracy. They are what happens when the procedural framework operates without ethical restraint, in a system designed around extraction.

This critique is not confined to political theory. In an interview with Forbes senior contributor Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey earlier this month, Alison Taylor of the New York University Stern School of Business observed that the dominant framework for ethical business has structurally collapsed. The “business case for ethics”, she argues, no longer convinces because the architecture on which it relied – voluntary international frameworks, an assumed direction of regulation and a 20th-century liberal consensus – no longer holds.

What she sees instead is incoherence: ambitious sustainability reports running alongside lobbying operations actively working against the legislation that those targets require. The instrumental defence of doing the right thing has run out of road.

What is needed, Taylor concludes, is the willingness to make values-based arguments without immediately translating them into return on investment. Her vocabulary is corporate; her diagnosis is the same one a careful reading of contemporary geopolitics produces. She names what is being done to a generation watching this gap widen as moral injury. Applied to populations on the receiving end of a procedural global order, the term is at least as accurate.

Ubuntu, the political philosophy carried in southern African thought, offers a different view of what politics is for. It is not, as it is often sentimentally translated, a feel-good statement about togetherness. Ubuntu is an ethic of power, specifically an ethic of how power must be exercised when one has it. It insists that the humanity of the other is not contingent on their agreement with you, their usefulness to you or their power relative to yours.

The Pedi proverb motho ke motho ka batho – a person is a person through other persons – is a political claim. It says that your standing as a moral and political agent depends on recognising others as full agents in turn. Power that violates this recognition delegitimises itself.

The difference is structural. Liberal democracy disciplines power through procedures. Ubuntu disciplines power through relationships. The procedural approach assumes that if institutions are well designed, the outcomes will be tolerable. The relational approach assumes that no procedure can produce a just outcome if those exercising power have not done the ethical work of recognising those affected by it. Liberal democracy can run with cruelty inside it as long as the cruelty is procedurally correct. Ubuntu cannot.

This is not a romantic claim. Ubuntu has been violated as often as it has been honoured by African states and leaders throughout the postcolonial period. The point is not that African societies have achieved what liberal democracy fails to achieve. The point is that an ethical framework exists in African philosophical inheritance for disciplining power in ways contemporary liberal democracy increasingly cannot. The framework is not being used.

Taylor’s argument about business and the claim about democracy converge on the same point: the instrumental justification has stopped working, and what we need is not a better framework but a recovery of values-based reasoning. Africa is routinely asked to prove that it can sustain liberal democracy, yet it is rarely asked what it might contribute to the philosophical infrastructure liberal democracy currently lacks. The asymmetry is a symptom of the problem.

A democracy disciplined by Ubuntu would not solve every problem. But it would refuse the move that allows liberal democracy to host extraction inside its procedures: the move that says, because the rules were followed, the harm does not count. Ubuntu doesn’t allow this. It asks the power question procedural democracy can no longer ask of itself: not whether you won, but whether you remained a person while winning.

This work needs more exposure. Not because African traditions are pure or because the West is fallen, but because the ethical infrastructure that liberal democracy and global business both assume – restraint, humility, recognition of the other as a full agent – is being eroded faster than its procedures can be repaired. Ubuntu is one of the resources available for such repair.

Africa has always understood that democracy is not only a system of decision-making; it is also a discipline of how human beings hold power over one another. The world is now learning, painfully, what happens when this discipline is forgotten. Africa already knows. It is time for the rest of the world to listen.

Research by Karabo Mangena, South African Institute of International Affairs 

The views expressed in this publication/article are those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the South African Institute of International Affairs 

This article was first published in the Mail & Guardian