Democracy by Force?
Third International Conference
March 24-28, 2008; Cairo, Egypt
Democracy means force of the people (demos: people; kratos: force), in the form of a sovereign authority that has the power to decide for itself and to enforce law. This conference seeks to address the distinction between the force of a people and democratization by force. To have democracy forced upon a people suggests an erosion of or an impingement on the very sovereignty that is the basis of democracy.
The idea that the people need to be taught lessons of democracy to make them fit for representative politics has a much older genealogy in the history of empires and nation states and is consonant with the developmental logic of bourgeois nationalism. Many who would not be inclined to endorse the policy and practice of democratization by force by an external power, would nevertheless be willing to countenance the presence of the nation-state’s law enforcement agents -- the police and the army -- at local and national elections.
One significant difficulty in critiquing the policy of democracy by force resides in the recognition that enforcement of democracy by a minority or by the state, rather than the force of the people finding sovereign expression, is the norm and constitutes the bulk of historical experience. Other difficulties in formulating a critique or imagining an alternative political system are tied to a residual faith and attachment to liberal political philosophy – to the idea of the state and the values of representative politics. What is often lost in the debate on democracy is that the term has exceeded its original meaning and utopian horizon to refer to myriad processes of governance that are not encapsulated merely by the distinctions between participatory democracy, constitutional monarchy, capitalist democracy and socialist democracy. The biggest conflict is not just between the ideals and practices of western liberal capitalist democracies (liberal democracies failing to live up to their ideals), but the epistemic gulf that separates western capitalist democracy and emergent paradigms of popular sovereignty in most of the world.
Recently, critical democracy studies have attempted to de-center the analysis of the state from the executive and the legislature, and to critique the fetish of the election as the primary marker of democratic participation and representation. It started with alternative notions of democracy, and other vantages for measuring democratic participation, paying attention to those modes of participation considered “irrational” (particularly religious public life), “interruptions” (protests), or “pollution” (the use or reoccupation of public space by vendors, the poor, women). What if we measured democracy by assessing the justice of its police and prisons instead of the regularity of its elections? What if enfranchisement were measured through a variety of points and forms of participation and assertion, rather than through voting and NGO “civil society” lobbying alone?
Critical democracy studies has been enriched by the work of philosophers and students of cultural studies who have complicated our understanding of democracy by demonstrating the historical contradictions that inhere in the concepts of freedom, sovereignty, citizen, and the state. Feminism has led the critical task of revealing the patrimonies of these categories of thought. In the process, the very categories of the “popular” and “popular sovereignty” have been brought into question. Jacques Derrida noted that the problem resides in the coalescing of sovereignty and freedom (Rogues, 2005). He called for “displacing the concept and continuing to mobilize the name”. We wish to take this cue from Derrida, but float the problem in a larger geography beyond the circumscription of European thought, and plan to pose the following questions for debate:
- What does democracy expect to deliver in global arenas where it has been largely sold in modular form as a political system already successful in the United States and Western Europe? Historically, what have been the social, political, and regional outcomes of democracy by force?
- How can we learn to recognize democracy’s different modalities that do not conform to the dominant paradigm of liberal-capitalism? How do we reconcile this nomenclature if we want to think beyond micro-histories? What might, for example, be learned from non-progressive popular participation, in the current or historical context?
- Given democracy as a political system is in itself seen as a mode of enfranchisement, nicely congealed in the performance of casting a vote, what would be the risks and effects of de-linking and distinguishing between democratic processes from electoral processes?
- What role has culture played in popular processes of democratization? What does the study of hegemony crucial to subaltern studies contribute to this inquiry?
Readings in Democracy, Popular Politics, and Democratization
Lisa Anderson, Transitions to Democracy
Haleh Afshar, Women and Empowerment: Illustrations from the Third World (Women's Studies at York)
Nazih N. Ayubi, Over-stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East
Delia M Boylan, Holding democracy hostage: Central bank autonomy in the transition from authoritarian rule (Working paper series)
Michael Bratton and Nicholas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)
Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
Gretchen Casper and Michelle M. Taylor, Negotiating Democracy: Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Pitt Series in Policy and Institutional Studies)
Douglas A. Chalmers, Carlos M. Vilas, Katherine Hite, and Scott B. Martin, The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America: Rethinking Participation and Representation (Oxford Studies in Democratization)
Lyman G. Chaffee, Political Protest and Street Art: Popular Tools for Democratization in Hispanic Countries (Contributions to the Study of Mass Media and Communications)
Partha Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed: Reflections of Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)
Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006)
Jacques Derrida, Rogues, Two Essays on Reason, trans by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)
Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies
Bruce W. Farcau, The Transition to Democracy in Latin America: The Role of the Military
Robert Fine, Civil Society (Democratization Studies)
T. Fitzsimmons, Beyond Barricades : Women, Civil Society, and Participation After Democratization in Latin America (Comparative Studies in Democratization)
Graeme J. Gill, The Dynamics of Democratization: Elites, Civil Society and the Transition Process
Jean Grugel, Democracy without Borders (Routledge/Ecpr Studies in European Political Science)
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford)
Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Juan E. Mendez, Guillermo A. O'Donnell, and Paulo Sergio De M. S. Pinheiro, The (Un)Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America (Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies)
Peter Lange, Robert H. Bates, Ellen Comisso, and Peter Hall, Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)
Catherine Mackinon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence,” Signs, vol 8, no 11 (1983), 635-58
El-Mikawi and Noha el-Mikawy, The Building of Consensus in Egypt's Transition Process
Chantal Mouffe, “Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics,” in Judith Butler and Joan Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political (London: Routledge, 1992)
Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)
Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989)
Jon C. Pevehouse, Democracy from Above: Regional Organizations and Democratization
Adam Przeworski, Democracy and Development; Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990
Adam Przeworski, Sustainable Democracy
Benjamin Reilly, Democracy and Diversity: Political Engineering in the Asia - Pacific (Oxford Studies in Democratization)
Alan Richards and John Waterbury, A Political Economy of the Middle East: State, Class, Economic Development
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Scattered speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular”, PostColonial Studies, vol 8, no 4 (Dec 2005), 475-486.
Ezra N. Suleiman and John Waterbury, The Political Economy of Public Sector Reform and Privatization
Mark Ungar, Elusive Reform: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Latin America
Frederic Volpi and Francesco Cavatorta , Democratization in the Muslim World: Changing Patterns of Authority And Power (Democratization Studies)
John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton Studies on the Near East)
John Waterbury, Exposed to Innumerable Delusions: Public Enterprise and State Power in Egypt, India, Mexico, and Turkey (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions)
Laurence Whitehead, The International Dimensions of Democratization: Europe and the Americas (Oxford Studies in Democratization)
Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford Political Theory)
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