Neo-liberalism and Resistance in Ghana: Understanding the Political Agency of the Subalterns in Social-historical Context

The political behaviour of the Ghanaian subalterns in the era of neo-liberalism is puzzling intellectually, and disappointing politically. Unlike the Bolivian subalterns, they have not independently resisted the free market policies of the neo-liberal state; even though, like Bolivia, these policies have inflicted rapacious social dislocation upon them. Indeed, they have consistently voted to rotate power between the two political parties (NDC and NPP) that have implemented these policies. How can we understand the difference in the political behaviour of the subalterns under similar hard material conditions? This dissertation tries to unravel this puzzle. Curiously, the puzzle is often not captured in the "industry" of leftist literature that emerged in the aftermath of the Chiapas revolt in 1994 and the "Battle" of Seattle in 1999, claiming a worldwide wave of anti-capitalism from "below", mostly in the Global South. Using a comparative-historical sociological research design, this dissertation transcends the unhistorical and narrow, materialist framework of subaltern political agency in this oeuvre of literature to situate it explicitly in the social and historical context in which they live. The dissertation has carefully and systematically documented the distinct elements of the social and historical context of Bolivia and Ghana, bringing out in clear relief the historical and sociological underpinnings of the difference in the political behaviour of the subalterns in the era of neo-liberalism. This method lends fresh theoretical and political insights into the agency of the subalterns as agents of not just anti-capitalism struggle under conditions of peripheral capitalism in the Global South, but as agents of struggle against the myriad of injustices that they face. The key finding of the dissertation, at once theoretical and methodological, is that the materialist framework of agency of the extant anti-neoliberalism literature cannot capture the complexity of subaltern agency and their contradictory political behaviour in the way that the social-historical framework does.