• human rights
• peace
• democratization
• Gambia
• Africa
• conflict transformation

Against the backdrop of ignorance - towards the furtherance of an informed society – Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16 emphasizes the significance of access to information. It is explicitly set out in target 16.10 — “to ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements”. (UN-GA, 2015). In effect, the media is the most powerful tool in shaping the perception of society about national issues, albeit media policy is a global phenomenon that has prodded information outlets for centuries. A regular basis for draconian media policies, however, is perpetuation of an orderly State, whereas the intrinsic motive is to keep the public uninformed of information that can potentially threaten authorities. This dissertation, in demonstrating the challenges of democratisation in post-independent Gambia through the lens of media and human rights, starts by carrying out a historical and comparative analysis of the sharply differing governance models of the various regimes of the country since independence, addressing unavoidable questions of power, justice, and civil liberties, and how they promote or inhibit the democratisation process. The dissertation, in the broader context of human rights, examines how the theoretical foundation of the universal right to free speech and freedom of expression is critical in stimulating the national discourse, with reference to the constraints imposed thereof in the form of media policy. In between the two competing margins of conservative notions and liberal doctrines (both formal and non-formal), the dissertation seeks to explore policies and practices by which the country’s democratisation process can be sustained through the protection and promotion of inherent values, using Constitutional and legal processes, albeit not at the cost of societal fragmentation. Towards this end, the dissertation examines various political and sociological theories on liberty and self-determination, and how these theories would sometimes contrastingly respond to contemporary contentions where the application or non-application of the rule of law as a method of policing would become pertinent. The dissertation, at the end, proposes a policy guideline on means and modes to realising the longstanding democratisation process of the country, through strategic policy reforms.