5th phase - 2025-2026 (CEsA - ISEG Research & University of Botswana): “The importance of plural and inclusive institutions in the struggle for democratization and pluralism: lessons from Botswana”.

 

Liberal transition processes in several African countries were disappointing in terms of effective democratization, becoming much closer to illiberal forms of democratization, but without the supposed virtues of illiberalism as praised by the populist authoritarianism of the famous speech of Viktor Órban in 2014 (Orbán, 2014). In several cases, such as Angola and Mozambique, studied by this project for more than two decades (www.pdeiam.com), elections simply reaffirmed the power of previous single parties, re-legitimizing its power within a multiparty context and favouring the same extractive structures and logics, recycled from the colonial period (Newitt, 2024), now in support of the same old clientelistic, extrativist and neo-patrimonial system.

 

The most recent discussions on the extractive institutional colonial legacy, that came forward with the Economy Nobel prizes of 2024 e 2025, revived the issue of colonial legacies and its developments in the post-colonial period, as promoters or inhibitors of innovation processes (creative destruction) in all its dimensions of the socio-political-economic organization (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012; Acemoglu & Johnson 2024; Mokyr 2018; Aghion, P., Antonin, C. & Bunel, S. 2021; Aghion, P. & Howitt 2025).

 

However, the case of Botswana has been constantly referred as an exception to such pattern, escaping such logics, seemingly demonstrating that it is possible to escape an historic legacy of extractive institutions to contemplate inclusive ones, as mentioned by Acemoglu and Robinson to the Botswana case (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012, Ch 14, p. 468).

 

The new line of research of this project, intends to study the case of Botswana, comprising 11 months of field research on the electoral and political-institutional system of Botswana in direct collaboration with Prof. Kebapetse Lotshwao, Head of th Department of Political and Administrative studies of the Univ. of Botswana.

 

This project assesses the impact of institutional and electoral integrity on pluralism and democratization in Botswana, attempting to find the decisive differences with the cases that this project has been studying for more than two decades, namely Angola and Mozambique and that are paradigmatic cases of neo-patrimonial extractive structures.