This article by Oda van Cranenburgh is published by Democracy in Africa. Here is an

During the past 36 years I have stood in many lecture rooms in this Faculty to teach the politics of development. In teaching, my mission has always been to inculcate in students the ability to analyze, discover implicit assumptions and normative preferences in concepts and theories, and to conduct good research in this field, in other words a scientific approach to politics. So when students asked me for my own opinion, I have been careful to separate political science from ‘politics’ and my personal convictions. At the same time, I pointed to the need to examine the normative preferences influencing their judgment. Today, I am not giving a political science lecture. I would like to talk broadly and more freely about the two themes which have inspired my work during the last 40 years: democracy and development. Today, I take the liberty sometimes to be explicitly normative, and even ‘political’ at times.

During the 1980s, when I started research on politics in developing countries, there was not much democracy around in what was then called “The Third World” Whether you liked it or not, most countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa were under various kinds of authoritarian rule: military rule, personal rule, ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ or one party rule. Some of these authoritarian systems were rightists and exclusionary (Latin American Bureaucratic Authoritarianism, e.g. Pinochet in Chile), others were outright predatory systems resting on a mix of patronage and repression (Sultanism of Marcos and Suharto), and others were based on socialism or humanist ideals (Nyerere in Tanzania). What later came to be known as the “Third Wave of Democracy” had not yet reached the Third World.

Read the full article here.