The success of a democratic society depends, Rawls thought, on members having a shared sense of justice, a common basis for reasoning about what is right. Otherwise, disagreements born from conflicts of interest and identity – and associated “distrust and resentment” – will have corrosive effects on social cooperation. But can we reasonably hope for a broadly shared sense of justice? Religious and philosophical pluralism arguably leave hope for an overlapping consensus on a conception of justice sufficient to cabin those corrosive effects. But what about the pluralism of conceptions of justice themselves? I argue that, even on favorable assumptions about people and social cooperation, we should expect serious disagreement about conceptions of justice and the forms of democracy they recommend, as well as conflicts between and among the interests and identities of citizens who endorse those competing conceptions. Even on these favorable assumptions, then, we have reason to worry – as I think Rawls always did – about the fragility of democracy.

Focusing in part on the distinction between action and performance, this chapter pursues the implications of post-Kantian metaphysics for our understanding of the nature of political endeavor, properly conceived.

This Chapter details the initial hints of a new account of constitutional review, examining in detail the development of and the theory underlying Justice Stone’s famous “Footnote Four” outlining the argument that Court should intervene only to enforce specific constitutional guarantees or to ensure that the political process was operating without impediment.

“Political Pluralism” contextualizes the sociopolitical formation of modern Nigeria, and explicitly expounds on the inadequacy of existing political structures and the importance of political pluralism to adequate governance and true democracy. Drawing insights from other African states and around the world, this discourse examines how various states have adapted to or responded to pluralism, and what pluralism looks like across Africa. This study identifies the seeming inadequacy of political pluralism in Nigeria because of the lack of proper implementation, shortsighted political visions, and bad governance thereby faulting the existing classical form of pluralism in Nigeria, and suggesting a form that accounts for its strengths and weaknesses, the converging points, and shared interests of cultures. The masquerade of fake alliances should be replaced by practical policies and democratic philosophies, along with implementable fiscal plans and other signifiers of a conservative or liberal political economy. It can work if it is coupled with regionalism, where each region is allowed to develop measures of autonomy in a democratic setting, a federal structure that distributes power between the regions, and a center held together by a binding constitution that is appropriate.

Chapter 4 examines the second macro-political factor in Rwanda’s path to genocide: democratization. Political liberalization simultaneously posed a threat to Rwanda’s incumbent elite and created a new political opportunity for challenger elites. The chapter shows how Rwanda’s move to liberalize – in line with the trend across Africa in the early 1990s – collided with its civil war with calamitous effect. The unfortunate coincidence of these two processes pushed Rwanda towards ethnic confrontation. The chapter explores how their interaction exposed a dark side to three processes commonly associated with political liberalization: pluralism, competition, and participation. Pluralization led to the expression of a broad spectrum of political interests and ideologies in Rwanda including the re-emergence of an ethnicist ideology. The chapter shows that this ideology had only marginal support initially. Moderation was ascendant at first and political parties sought cross-ethnic support. However, as the threat posed by the war escalated, this changed. The internal political competition created by multipartyism interacted with this external military contestation. In the face of weak constraints domestically and internationally, ethnic extremism gradually moved from the background to the foreground of Rwandan politics and society. Liberalization also increased political participation and a new class of challenger elites emerged at the local level, a radical sub-set of which would become mobilizing agents during the genocide.

Debates about sharī‘a and its relationship to public law, political pluralism, and Christianity have been a dominant feature of recent political discourse. Unfortunately, Christian political theologians have failed to engage with the challenges raised by Islamic political theology, instead either essentializing Islam or focusing on broad questions of social diversity. To remedy this, the chapter develops a comparative political theological method for engaging debates over the law. By adopting a comparative approach, two routes that dominate discussions of political theology in Christian-Muslim exchange are avoided. One leans strongly on secularism and too quickly silences religious imaginaries and their critiques of modernity. The other reasserts the ultimacy of religious community against the secular, largely through reinscribing battle lines between Christendom and the dār al-Islām. The chapter concludes that debates regarding sharī‘a, secularism, and law can be productively reframed by attending to the history of debate over the law in Christian-Muslim encounter and the nuanced theological perspectives on law and sovereignty within both traditions.