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The roughly 50 years of Cold War between the Western bloc and the defunct Communist bloc was not just a bipolar struggle for ideological supremacy between the capitalist and socialist systems, it was also constructed by the victorious Western camp as a moral struggle between liberal democracy (canvassed as a universal good) and a godless form of totalitarian dictatorship (viewed as inherently evil).
The West indisputably won the Cold War. Communism was vanquished and most of the former communist countries euphorically embraced capitalist economic reforms with its concomitance of liberal democracy. For countries and regions on the periphery of the ideological divide, where the Cold War rivalry often precipitated varied intensities of armed conflicts, the end of the Cold War came as a welcome relief. The succeeding dispensation of “unipolarity” opened vast opportunities for a quickened end of different ideologically-anchored wars (e.g. the civil wars in Mozambique and Angola; the independence liberation war in Namibia, and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa), as well as opportunities for the liberation of the African continent from a barrage of military dictatorships and one party pseudo-democracies. Liberal democracy has for all the good reasons resurfaced triumphantly as the only game in town, not only in Africa but worldwide – thanks to the combined forces of western-backed, pro-democracy civil society movements within the undemocratic states and the external pressures from various western governments and multilateral institutions aimed at promoting liberal reforms and regime change.