Introduction: Towards a Multipolar History of Democracy

Abstract This chapter provides a brief historical development of democracy with a special focus on the second half of the twentieth century. It builds on the body of literature which aims to complicate the ‘standard history of democracy’ and demonstrates the history of democracy outside the Western context. The chapter looks at democracy as an idea and as a praxis across the usually separated histories of socialist and post-colonial states in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, in parts of the world understood now as authoritarian and non-democratic. The examples of how the citizens of the countries of the ‘second’ and ‘third’ world envisioned and practised democracy for themselves give a sense of different forms of democracy from that of liberal democracy.