The revolution that introduced the African nationwide Congress (ANC) to strength in South Africa used to be fractured by way of inner conflict.  Migrant employees from rural Zululand rejected a number of the egalitarian values and guidelines primary to the ANC’s liberal democratic platform and arranged themselves in an try to sabotage the stream. This anti-democracy stance, which persists at the present time as a right away critique of "freedom" in neoliberal South Africa, hinges on an idealized imaginative and prescient of the agricultural domestic and a hierarchical social order crafted partly via the applied sciences of colonial governance during the last century. 

In studying this clash, Jason Hickel contributes to vast theoretical debates approximately liberalism and democratization within the postcolonial world. Democracy as Death interrogates the Western beliefs of person freedom and employer from the viewpoint of these who oppose such beliefs, and questions the assumptions underpinning theories of anti-liberal activities. The publication argues that either democracy and the political technology that makes an attempt to provide an explanation for resistance to it presuppose a version of personhood local to Western capitalism, which could no longer function cross-culturally.