Colonial Genealogies of Pluralism: Consociation as Disavowal in Contemporary Democratic Theory

This article reframes understandings of pluralism in democratic theory by showing that the management of late and post-colonial identitarian conflict was integral to its incorporation into twentieth-century political science. It does so by reconstructing the central but underexamined place of theories of consociational democracy in efforts to reform South Africa’s apartheid constitution in the 1970s and 80s. Consociational democratic theory offered such promising resources for apartheid reform, it contends, because it entwined (a) a conception of social pluralism that redescribed apartheid’s racial hierarchy as identitarian difference with (b) a conception of institutional pluralism that curtailed the most transformative possibilities of decolonization through universal suffrage. Recovering pluralism’s colonial genealogies clarifies the conditions under which the recognition of identitarian diversity can function as a disavowal of racial domination, positioning democratic theory as an adjunct to projects of neo-colonial order.