Audience
The Center for the Study of Democracy and the Department of Anthropology present a virtual lecture and discussion with Dr. Sheldon Gellar: "Supporting and Sustaining Democracies and Resilience in Sahelian Africa". The program will be held Thursday, October 28 from 12-1 pm in the Blackistone Room followed by lunch for attendees in the Gail Harmon Courtyard.
Why and how so many Sahelian African states are suffering from growing instability, violence, bad governance, growing economic inequality and declining confidence in regimes purporting to be democracies? The causes stem from a multitude of factors: French colonial legacy; nature of post-colonial regimes ; the imposition of external political ,economic, legal, social, and cultural norms, institutions and models not adapted to local conditions.
The talk presents alternative holistic African-centered approaches supporting democracy and strengthening resilience. These include reduction of dependency on foreign aid; greater understanding of local environmental conditions; greater participation of African experts and local populations in setting priorities, design, and implementation through decentralization of decision-making It will also provide short case studies of methods used by Sahelian experts and local populations to increase accountability and internal democracy of national and local institutions, control corruption, and to deal with conflict. With so many western countries in crisis, it is now time to learn from Africa.
Dr. Sheldon Gellar has more than half a century of experience in Sahelian Africa as academic researcher, teacher, consultant, advocate, and colleague of Sahelian democracy and development practitioners and American and international aid officials. He has done research and consulting in 15 African countries. His studies and assessments cover a wide range of areas—conflict analysis, democratic governance, decentralization, religion and politics, natural resource management, land tenure, desertification, agricultural policy implementation, and participatory development strategies. Gellar also served as democracy advisor to the USAID mission in
Senegal(1998-99).
His books include Democracy in Senegal: Tocquevillian Analytics in Africa which provides an inter-disciplinary approach to studying transitions from aristocratic to equalitarian and democratic societies. Gellar has taught at Indiana University, Michigan State University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and been a and visiting scholar research associate at the Ostrom’s Workshop in Political Theory and Public Policy at Indiana University.