Democracy in postcolonial Ghana: tropes, state power and the defence committees

This article examines how the Jerry Rawlings military government, the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) in Ghana, framed its political agenda using liberal tropes about participatory democracy as a strategy to manufacture legitimacy and mediate political-economic crisis. The People’s Defence Committees (PDCs) and Workers’ Defence Committees (WDCs), created in 1981 and dissolved in 1984, were presented by the PNDC as innovative …