Justice as Political Idea: Reframing Anti-Autocratic Sentiment in Malawi’s Democratic Struggles

This paper examines how justice-centred political ideas have come to structure anti-autocratic sentiment in Malawi’s competitive but uneven democracy. Drawing on the 2014, 2019, and 2025 electoral cycles, the analysis shows that Malawians increasingly interpret political legitimacy through a moral framework that places distributive fairness, procedural integrity, and accountability at the heart of democratic life. Rather than mobilising primarily around ethnicity or material patronage, citizens have articulated a vernacular language of justice that defines what counts as acceptable political rule and what breaches the moral boundary of authority. This orientation became particularly visible in moments of electoral dispute, where civic mobilisation, judicial engagement, and resistance to executive overreach were framed as efforts to restore a violated sense of fairness rather than merely to defend partisan preference. The paper situates Malawi within a broader African pattern in which ordinary citizens draw on ethical idioms to contest domination, corruption, and exclusion, thereby producing their own political theories of accountability and legitimate authority. Examples from Zambia, Senegal, Kenya, and Uganda reveal parallel developments in which justice, purity, and popular moral reasoning animate demands for democratic renewal. These cases demonstrate that African publics are not reacting to democratic breakdowns as passive subjects, but actively constructing political ideas that reshape the terms of political possibility. The argument contributes to the ideational turn by foregrounding how political thought emerges from everyday contestation, and how Global South cases enrich theoretical debates on democracy, authority, and accountability. It shows that justice-centred ideology is not an aspirational abstraction but a lived interpretive framework through which citizens evaluate power, envision alternatives, and mobilise against autocratic drift. The Malawian experience therefore offers a vital entry point for rethinking how democracy is imagined, defended, and remade in postcolonial settings.