Paper short abstract:

This Swiss-South African research partnership debates challenges to democracy in both countries. The paper discusses experiences with a novel approach: the African gaze on Switzerland and the Swiss gaze on Africa offered interesting insides and deepened our understanding of how democracy works.

Paper long abstract:

This paper debates experiences from a Swiss-South African research partnership on challenges to democracy. Instead of exclusively focusing on South Africa, which is usually the norm in partnerships between "Africanists" and African scholars, we have investigated various arenas of democratic politics and the challenges to democracy they provoke. Despite differences, a striking similarity is that both countries consider themselves model democracies that tend to overlook deficiencies and threats to democracy. The two democratic systems - representative versus direct democracy - mark distinctive ways of putting democratic ideals into practice. Strategies employed within the two political systems by different actors to engage with and influence political processes, the quality of government-society relations and the ways in which different interest groups respond to political opportunity structures offer a comparative perspective.

We present empirical studies on identity and the struggle for autonomy within the Swiss Confederation, populist politics and the understanding of and expectations from democracy in a context where history, heritage, tradition and culture shape contestations in current politics.

The insights we have derived from an African gaze on Switzerland and a Swiss gaze on Africa, from this 'regard croisé', have deepened our understanding of how democracy works. Moreover, this novel approach not only offered spaces for African academics to move away from an exclusive focus on Africa but also allowed for critical reflections on the academic tradition, language and intellectual agenda of "Africanists" from outside the continent and African scholars.