To aid research on 'The State of Eloquence: Parliaments and Democratic Discourse in Mali,'

In the last twenty years electoral multi-party forms of democracy have gained universal validity relegating all other political systems to illegitimacy. During the 1990s many African countries moved from 'authoritarian' regimes to 'democratic' ones. Mali was renowned as one of the most successful African cases of democratization until the 2012 military coup. This research explores the actual political practices that such democratization processes triggered and attempts to take seriously explicit and implicit reactions to electoral democracy. It is centered on the discursive aspects of politics, more specifically on the status of debate and deliberation in so called 'pluralist' regimes. It is empirically grounded in the observation of a large number of different political meetings -- ranging from the National Assembly to youth political debates -- in Mali in 2010, 2011, and 2012. Those recordings provide the evidence needed to explore the following questions: Has electoral democracy allowed for the expression of a more diverse spectrum of political means and ends? What are the ways in which electoral democracy disciplines and uniforms political movements and demands while promoting pluralism and dissent? How does the limit between democracy and anti-democracy gets discursively established before and after the military coup?