Nigeria’s democratisation efforts since attaining political independence from Britain have been tumultuous and have spanned over three successive republics. A persistent bug decimating Nigeria’s democracy and repeatedly leading to military coups has been brazen electoral violence perpetrated by the nation’s political elite. Nigeria's 2019 Democratic Experience analyses and explains what went wrong in Nigeria’s experiment with democracy. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and the world’s seventh most populous nation, also contributes 70% of West Africa’s population. She is sub-Saharan Africa’s largest oil producer and has remained Africa’s largest economy by GDP since 2014. The country has hundreds of diverse ethnic nationalities and languages grouped into 36 states (or federating units) and an independent federal capital territory. Though recognized as Africa’s largest democracy, her democratisation process since the 1960s has remained tumultuous with massive electoral violence and political intolerance. This repeatedly compelled the military to intervene in the nation’s political history in the years 1966, 1983 and 1985. It is these developments that provided the motivation for this volume to capture for posterity the conduct of the 2019 General Elections in Nigeria.

Nigeria's Stumbling Democracy and its Implications for Africa's Democratic Movement is the first book to recount and analyze Nigeria's controversial general elections of April 2007. Because Nigeria's immense and diverse population of 140 million people and its wealth of natural resources make it a microcosm of Africa, Nigerian politics are an ideal case study and bellwether by which to view and understand African politics and the ongoing democratic experiments on the continent. Ten leading scholars of Nigerian and African politics, variously based in Nigeria, the US, and Europe, contribute original chapters commissioned by Professor Okafor to provide an account at once deep and comprehensive of what went wrong with these disputed presidential, federal, and state elections; together with their implications for the future of the democratic movement, both in Nigeria and in Africa as a whole. Although the 2007 general elections resulted in the first-ever handover of political power from one civilian government to another in the history of Nigeria, by which the two-term Christian president Olusegun Obasanjon was succeeded by a Muslim, Alhaji Musa Yar'Adua, they were condemned by internal and international watchdogs for pervasive vote-rigging, violence, intimidation, and fraud which were, as this book documents, perpetrated by and with the connivance of the nation's security forces. The disappointment of continental hopes that these elections might finally break with Nigeria's history of tainted elections has grave repercussions for the democracy movement not only in Nigeria but throughout Africa-as seen in the knock-on effect upon the disastrous general elections in Kenya later the same year.

Human embryo research touches upon strongly felt moral convictions, and it raises such deep questions about the promise and perils of scientific progress that debate over its development has become a moral and political imperative. From in vitro fertilization to embryonic stem cell research, cloning, and gene editing, Americans have repeatedly struggled with how to define the moral status of the human embryo, whether to limit its experimental uses, and how to contend with sharply divided public moral perspectives on governing science. Experiments in Democracy presents a history of American debates over human embryo research from the late 1960s to the present, exploring their crucial role in shaping norms, practices, and institutions of deliberation governing the ethical challenges of modern bioscience. J. Benjamin Hurlbut details how scientists, bioethicists, policymakers, and other public figures have attempted to answer a question of great consequence: how should the public reason about aspects of science and technology that effect fundamental dimensions of human life? Through a study of one of the most significant science policy controversies in the history of the United States, Experiments in Democracy paints a portrait of the complex relationship between science and democracy, and of U.S. society's evolving approaches to evaluating and governing science's most challenging breakthroughs.