ASAUK 2018

This paper sketches the outline of a realist account of republicanism from and for the global South. It concentrates on the way republican ideas, as developed and contested over centuries in Europe, are both fertile and barren ground for understanding the various problems that face young, democratic republics like South Africa. More generally, it argues that this context throws into useful relief how political theory can respond creatively to moments of political rupture or crisis. In thinking through republicanism and crisis in this way, the paper critically reinforces some contemporary arguments about the relationship between realism, utopianism and imagination in political theory.