Brian Milstein presents paper on Policing and Democracy in Prague, Dublin, and Giessen

Dr Brian Milstein (Politics & Public Administration) presented a working paper, titled “Policing the Democratic System: Democratic Security, System Effects, and the Politics of Equal Inclusion,” at the May 2024 Philosophy & Social Sciences Conference in Prague.

This conference, co-founded in Dubrovnik by Jürgen Habermas and Gajo Petrović, is a premier meeting for researchers working in the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and featured presentations by scholars from Columbia, Yale, Berlin, Frankfurt, Groningen, Stockholm, Oxford, NUS, and elsewhere.

A version of this paper was also presented to the European Consortium of Political Research, whose annual conference took place in Dublin in August, and at a workshop on “Human Rights in Times of Insecurity” at the Justus Liebig University of Giessen in early September.

The paper, co-authored with Dr Afsoun Afsahi of the University of British Columbia, uses a recently developed approach known as “democratic systems” to improve our understanding of the role of policing institutions and practices in democratic society, show how recent conflicts over policing in the US, UK, and elsewhere may be understood as problems of democratic legitimacy, and highlight possible limitations of popular proposed solutions. In so doing, it also extends our understanding of how various social institutions coalesce into a “system” that conditions the terms of democratic inclusion, collective agenda and will formation, and collective decision-making.

The paper is part of a longer-term project researching democratic systems theory and analyzing the repercussions for democracy of institutions and social phenomena not typically looked at by mainstream democratic theory.