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Department of Politics and Public Administration Seminar
Wednesday November 10, 2.15pm
Democratic Terrains: Remapping Democracy in an Era of Crisis and Transition
Brian Milstein (University of Limerick)
Abstract
The last decade has been a challenging one for Western democracies, which have found themselves subject to a variety of major crises, with 9/11, the 2008 crisis, and the current pandemic being among the most notable. Several of these crises have in turn, fomented the rise of a number of legitimation challenges, ranging from the Occupy and anti-austerity movements to the “populist wave” to Black Lives Matter. I argue that these developments present both a challenge and an opportunity for democratic theory. It presents a challenge insofar as, despite periodic crises long being a notable feature of modern society, their provenance is rarely grappled with explicitly in democratic theory. But it also presents an opportunity, in that there is much we can learn about what democracy and justice require in 21st-century society.
The project I am developing proposes to take these recent legitimation challenges as entry points in the exploration of what I call “democratic terrains,” by which I mean infrastructural features of society that support crucial bases of democratic life. Institutions such as central banks, police forces, and the internet are normally meant to work in the background of democracy and be themselves politically neutral. However, recent crises and efforts at crisis management have shown them to be not only politically fraught but also consequential to how democracies function. Drawing on an emerging school of thought known as “deliberative systems theory,” I propose a framework for incorporating these infrastructural bases into democratic theory, interpreting their interactions with democratic modes of inclusion, agenda-formation, and decision-making, and showing how they become potential sources of legitimation problems.
All welcome!