Global Media Journal African Edition

 Within this theme "media and governance in Africa," the GMJ, African Edition encourages research papers addressing the challenges facing the Africa media to cope with the Millennium Development Goals.

 Non-African scholarship still considers the threat to the future of African democracies to lie in the small number of citizens who "want" democracy. This low demand for political reform is described by Dabezies: "If [democracy] corresponds to a diffuse feeling of freedom, indeed, at a higher level, to a profound desire to liberate the masses, it as yet directly concerns but a minority, intellectuals and civil servants in particular, certain of whom have only recently begun to oppose the regimes they denounce" (1992:25).

 This dilemma resonates with the pervasion of 'Afropessimism', a sense of Africa’s inescapable descent into economic decline, political collapse and social disorganisation that is shared by scholars, policy makers and media in the global North.

 This debate on democracy in Africa questions the level of analytical paradigms that are usually employed to define and measure democratic progress, as well as evaluating what is happening in the African political arena.

 Through this issue, there is a call for a new approach to define democracy in Africa, and understand the values of its representation through exploring nouvelle conceptual framework that reflects its locality within the African context, content and contests, by enquiring about the media problems emerging with 'Rule?' Rule by? The people? '

 Please refer to our submission guidelines (http://globalmedia.journals.ac.za/index.php/pub/about/submissions#authorGuidelines)

Please send any queries before the deadline to (isaleh@aucegypt.edu & jre09is@gmail.com)

Ibrahim Saleh,

Editor of the Global Media Journal, African Edition (http://globalmedia.journals.ac.za/pub)