Democracy in Crisis: Violence, Alterity, Community

Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium, 2017

This paper seeks to examine the relation between democracy and violence. It will first offer an historical overview of the emergence of democracy in relation to three major political events: the English civil war from 1640-1660; the American war of independence and the drafting of the Bill of Rights; and the French Revolution. It will propose that, apart from the fact that each of these struggles was marked by large-scale and protracted violence, they also shared a common discourse – the discourse of rights, understood proprietorially. The paper will argue that the emergence of democracy as articulated through this discourse of proprietorial rights was, in turn, closely related to the emergence of the contemporary form of the nation-state, and that, consequently, it is founded on a paradox: the discourse of the nation (or nationalism) has been historically an exclusivist one, while the discourse of democracy seeks, by definition, to be inclusive. It will argue that the colonial moment served on the one hand, to disseminate the discourses of nationalism and democracy; while on the other, it complicated the paradoxical relation between them further, when the discourse of rights (integral to both) often emphasized community rights over individual rights, at least in colonial South Asia. The contours of community, then and since, have been overwhelmingly determined by the personal law system and the communal patriarchates. Given that, this paper will argue that the tensions between the exclusivism of such communalisms and the inclusivism of the democratic discourse leads inevitably to the production of cultures of violence. It will conclude by questioning the sustainability of a rights-based understanding of democracy.

IDS Bulletin, 2009

There are many studies of violence within specific fields of the social sciences, but the next stage in our evolving understanding of violence may lie with interdisciplinary approaches. By traversing traditional academic categories, violence as a variable may become more visible in its multiple modes. It is through our ability to see the linkages between interpersonal, cultural, collective, political, state, interstate and structural violences that we can gain a better understanding of its persistence in human interactions. Researchers for this IDS Bulletin set out not only to understand contemporary dynamics of violence, but also to work with people trapped in violent places, spaces and histories who were willing to talk about and act upon their situation. Researching violence in an interactive way with those living in the thick of it posed many ethical, safety, epistemological and methodological challenges. These are documented in this IDS Bulletin alongside findings on the dimensions and impact of violence in different contexts.

The Sociological Review, 2014

Violence is a force for creating integrities as well as one that violates, pollutes and destroys already existing entities. In this paper I address the role of what Ariella Azoulay terms the 'political imagination' in constituting social aggregates committed to the defence of a community itself brought into being by the imagining of a force dedicated to its destruction. Such a group's perception of what Laclau and Mouffe call an 'antagonism' spurs it to mark out and defend its boundaries with violence-a violence often manifested aggressively (pre-emptively). Collective perceptions of an other's antagonism are often overdetermined, either by historical memory or political manipulation, and it is often the case that an enemy is sited and a programme of 'defensive' violence inaugurated without any 'real' justification. Here I demonstrate, using events drawn from the formation of the State of Israel and the collapse of what is now 'Former Yugoslavia', that it is in designating an other against which destructive violence must be mobilized that an entity realizes-through the negation of that it would negate-what it is it fights to defend.

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2020

This article’s guiding thesis is that the theory of radical democratic citizenship is built on a tension between a radical, conflictual element and a democratic element. As radical democrats, these philosophers point to the intimate relation between conflict and both emancipation and democracy. But as radical democrats, they also propose different methods that prevent conflict from breaking up the polis—the common ground that makes democratic conflict possible. I look at two radical democrats’ way of dealing with this tension: Chantal Mouffe and Étienne Balibar. My claim is that the former ends up overemphasising the danger of division in her later democratic works and is therefore unable to account for more intense forms of democratic resistance (such as riots). In the work of Balibar, however, we find a way of dealing with this tension.

2021

In this paper, I clarify the connection of political practices of inclusion and exclusion with the issue of incriminating Otherness. If we attribute an ontological status to incriminating Otherness, we end up with a legitimization of various political exclusions and/or of assimilation. Moreover, we establish a rigid dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion, which presupposes, I argue, the ontologization of the ‘Self versus Otherness’ dipole. These implications of the theorization of identity’s construction along incriminatory-ontological lines escape the attention of many thinkers who are otherwise interested in inclusivist politics. Therefore, this paper will take up constructionist approaches of incrimination as an example of a theorization of “identity ‘versus’ alterity” that allows such implications. My first step is briefly to clarify the notion of inclusion. Then I present some constructionist approaches to identity, which maintain that identity presupposes an external enemy in order to be constructed. I explain how this position establishes a rigid dichotomy between Self and Otherness and by implication between inclusion and exclusion. Along such dichotomous lines, exclusion and assimilation are legitimized, and important nuances of identity and inclusion are bypassed.

Violence, Alterity, Community, 2010

Identities in Flux: Globalisation, Trauma, and Reconciliation, 2018

Since the third wave of democratisation reached Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and its communist regimes began to crumble, the fate of liberal democracies has become polemicised. In 1989, the end of another grand ideology of the twentieth century was hailed as the “end of history”, proclaiming liberal democracy the final form of government and the “triumph of the Western idea” (Fukuyama, 1992). Liberal democracy was now the only game in town, having defeated all viable ideological competitions. Not only in the Western world, but in regions such as East Asia, including China, the liberal idea was taking root and setting off on the path of capitalist consumerism. Many expected liberal democracies to gradually spread to all corners of the globe. Yet, despite the hope inspired by the Arab Spring across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, the mood has grown more sombre over the years as several countries of the 1989 wave have backslidden democratically, and the Arab Spring has seen mixed results, even descending into violent conflict, resulting in mass migration. Growing ranks of political leaders in the transitioning countries, as well as in the old democracies, are moving away from liberal democracy toward apocalyptic populism and authoritarian practices. “Globalisation crisis” is a term often misused to strike fear into the hearts of many who deem their traditional identities and economic securities threatened. In response, political participation is becoming more contentious. “Assertive citizens” in the democratic and democratising world trust political leadership less and less (Norris, 2011; Dalton & Welzel, 2014). The annual Edelman Trust Barometer shows a global decline in trust, reaching a crisis point in 2017. In 2018, the world battles for truth. Trust is increasingly polarised between the informed public—those who are college educated, consumers of the media, and with the top 25% of income—and the general public (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2018). It is worth mentioning that Fukuyama’s article on the “end of history” does not end on an optimistic note. He comments that while there may be no viable ideological alternative to a liberal democracy, it is quite capable of coexisting with identity politics, ethnic, and nationalist violence (Fukuyama, 1992). In his most recent book, he continues to develop this idea, claiming that there were two streams of identity politics unleashed with the French Revolution: one devoted to the pursuit of personal dignity and individual autonomy, the other to the pursuit of collective autonomy and dignity (Fukuyama, 2018). At times, these are pursued simultaneously, as is the case of the European human rights framework, particularly the human rights documents enshrined within the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe which make a point of collective rights pertaining to national and/or linguistic minorities. The long-term global democratisation process was propped up by the spread of the global human rights culture. Since the Second World War and the passing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—drafted under the auspices of Eleanor Roosevelt and an international team of lawyers and scholars in under three years— dozens of global and regional human rights covenants and declarations, some having reached near universal status, have been signed and ratified by almost all governments represented in the United Nations. Even ruthless dictators pay lip service to human rights, testifying to their global acceptance. This has contributed to the understanding of a democracy centred on the concept of dignity. Although the concept itself has been evolving since the Enlightenment’s ideas of autonomy, it was the international framework of human rights that placed it front and centre in the concept of democratic society as human rights are the tools for its implementation. Dignity serves as the benchmark for democracies, advanced and developing alike. For the old democracies, the dignitarian framework provides criteria upon which the depth of the quality of democracy can be evaluated: to what extent it meets the conditions for free and equal development of human potentials, how effective it is in protecting the most vulnerable in the society, and how it fulfils the implementation of civil and political rights or is able to ameliorate the social and economic disparities between people. The collective pursuit of dignity has taken on many forms, from the quests for self-determination to the pursuit of securing minority rights and access to representation and decolonisation movements in the post-colonial world. Founded upon membership in a collectivity, the collective dignity is derived from narratives that shape identities, oftentimes formulated in antagonism towards a narrative of a different collectivity. Narratives of ethnic groups are of a tragic form, interweaving the episodes of the past with the emotions of pity and fear, serving as the glue that binds together and endows the community with a purpose. Countries of the third wave transition were faced with the added burden of the transformation process. Not only did they have to address economic and social transformations, and the institutional remake of the societies to enable the transition to democracy; the leaders and the civil society of countries in Central and Eastern Europe, parts of Africa, Latin America, and East Asia also had to reinvent their identities, facing the ghosts of oppressive past regimes. Some stayed the course, with greater or lesser difficulty, others slid back into authoritarianism of various sorts. The burst of democratic participation brought millions of people closer to political life, and the stakes decided within are intertwined with personal stakes, grievances, and dignity needs. Processes of transitional justice had to mediate the flood of demands, needs, and expectations. Some managed through robust institutional processes to address the need for justice in the case of the former perpetrators and healing in the case of the former victims, and truth-finding, establishing archives for documentation of the crimes and atrocities committed in the past. Others opted for more modest institutional redresses, and a controlled narrative of the past to secure the legitimacy and stability of new governments. These negotiations depended on the constellations of the actors within the societies’ elites and former oppositions, the nature of the transitions, the amount of negotiation and settlement between the old and new elites, and, essentially, the access to the authorship of the narrative framework at the onset of the transitions. Some of the societies, such as South Africa and those in Latin America, also had to address the legacy of mass violence and the resulting cultural trauma which continue to haunt both the individual survivors and their families and communities. The lingering guilt, shame, quest for recognition and justice, and the unaddressed personal as well as cultural trauma are all added challenges that transitional societies have to navigate while pursuing (more or less successfully) the quest for individual and collective dignity. Furthermore, transitional societies also exist in the larger frameworks of post-colonialism and post-socialism. The collective narratives within these regions are also shaped by the structures of dependence that have historically framed broader relations, and impacted identities within. The legacy bequeathed by both structures on the post-colonial and post-socialist societies are perceptions of being on the periphery, a mistrust in the Big History written by the North and the West, and a sense of victimhood and betrayal. These influence how identities evolve during transitional times, and to what extent they are able to convert the tragic narratives into more constructive stories, thereby addressing the ghosts of the past. The trends outlined above are the themes touched upon by the authors of this book, both theoretically as well as in case studies. They cover various parts of the world, with an emphasis on Central European countries and South Africa, but also include Nigeria, Japan, Spain, and the United States.

Masking the Systematic Violence Perpetuated By Liberalism Through the Concept of ‘Totalitarianism’, 2016

Starting from the European conquest in 1492 which established the beginning of colonialism, going through the establishment of liberalism’s racial (‘social’) contract, and coming to present times of neocolonialism and neoliberalism, this paper underscores the interdependence between colonialism and liberalism, and liberalism’s systematic violence of oppression, arguing that the term ‘totalitarianism’ is unable to shed light onto this violence. The paper is organised into three sections. Firstly, I make the case against liberalism’s congratulatory self-assessments, contending that colonialism has always already co-existed and been perpetuated through liberalism. I highlight the futility and liberal characteristics of the term ‘totalitarianism’, to then unsettle Hannah Arendt’s account of it as an allegedly unexpected, unique and unprecedented abnormality of modernity. It will be seen that her linking between imperialism and colonialism lacks a comprehensive analysis of the violence prevalent within social relations: more precisely, the violence of racism which persists under liberalism. In the second part, attention is shifted to the solipsistic historicity and identity of Europe/the West, and its concurrent violence of ‘othering’. The colonial dimensions of ‘modernity’ and its hierarchical binaries will become apparent through an analysis of the way in which the ideology of whiteness characterises this violence and absorbs the radical alterity (absolute difference) of the non-European. The Holocaust, it will be argued, ought to be considered a particularity of colonialism: it is colonialism brought home to Europe. The third section stresses the need to de-link social relations and (re)presentations, state structures, practices and knowledge from the colonial matrix of power by employing a decolonial approach to history, knowledge and practice.

Democratic Theory, 2017

The Economist Intelligence Unit (2017) proclaimed 2016 among the worst of years for democracy in the world. For the fi rst time since The Economist Intelligence Unit began reporting its measures of democracy in 2006, the United States has been downgraded to a "fl awed democracy." Scholars researching contemporary populism have also recently reported that disaff ection with the democratic status quo in countries, including the United States (Foa and Mounk 2017) and the United Kingdom (Webb 2013), has been growing in volume and shifting in tenor (see, especially, Moffi tt 2016; Rooduijn 2013; Torre 2015). We see two main reasons for this disaff ection. The fi rst comes down to the "usual gripes"-lack of trust in politicians (Amnå and Ekman 2014) and a diffi culty in relating to dominant political parties (Gauja 2016: 89) leading to low voter turnout, especially in subnational elections (Green and Gerber 2015: 174-177), 1 as well as a sense that certain political practices are behind the times (Innerarity 2010: 52). In the United States and the United Kingdom this disaff ection has been amplifi ed by citizens' responses to the global economic crisis (GEC), which began in 2007 and whose eff ects are still being felt. 2 The second reason is because there is a fragmented, diffi cult to represent subset of citizenry in both the United States and the United Kingdom. These citizens have, to varying extents, been feeling left behind as, over the last 30 to 40 years, the focus of representative politics moved from tackling class-based material concerns to ones framed around recognition and identity (