Democratic Moment Research Articles

HIGHEST CASTE ON THE DEFENDANT'S SEAT:

After the end of colonial periods, many Latin American countries struggled with authoritarian regimes. Most of these countries experienced waves of authoritarianism followed by democratic moments during the last century. For that reason, democratic institutions were built under the imminent threat of a coup d’état. To ensure that presidents would not be persecuted for political reasons, Brazil has established that its Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal) would be the only court with powers to judge presidents (except impeachment cases), federal deputies, and senators, amongst other higher authorities. Based on the Brazilian example, this work seeks to understand if other Latin American countries also offer the same protection to their authorities and why. What are the factors that influence the existence of jurisdictional privilege? Furthermore, what does influence the extent of the privilege given to more or fewer authorities? This research used a multi-method approach to present and analyze the institutional phenomenon of jurisdictional privilege. First of all, exploratory and descriptive comparative research was carried out from Latin American constitutional texts to identify where jurisdictional privileges are present and their respective amounts. Then, a quantitative analysis applied statistical tests to the variables included in the research database, to check possible correlations between institutional quality indexes and the variation in the number of representative categories of political authorities benefiting from the privilege of jurisdiction. Finally, this work performed a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to describe the logical relationship between the variables in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of the phenomenon under study. Keywords: Latin America; institutional comparative analysis; Supreme Courts; jurisdictional privilege; empirical approach.

Uncovering the Revolutionaries from Epistemic Injustice: The Politics of Popular Revolts in Kyrgyzstan

Abstract This article introduces readers to the Special Issue on the politics of popular revolts in Kyrgyzstan and outlines the rationale for a renewed empirical and theoretical debate that would focus on more equitable production of knowledge. The existing literature, namely the scholarship on patronage and “color revolutions,” downplays citizens’ agency and neglects the democratic beginnings of Kyrgyzstan’s popular uprisings. These ontological misrepresentations foment epistemic injustice against the tens of thousands of citizens who have participated—and sacrificed their lives—in struggles against dispossession and inequalities. Based on ethnographic material and documented stories, the present article uncovers popular voices with the aim of drawing attention to local idioms of change. It proposes to read popular revolts as disruptions of the constituted order and hence the return of the political. Popular uprisings thus constitute deeply democratic moments, as they seek to destabilize the oligarchic status quo, even if fleetingly.

Transition to Democracy and the New Authoritarian Phenomena: The Case of Albania

The democratic system is characterized by its most evident features, such as the presence of participation in political choices, discussions in social life, the constant presence of political opposition, etc., for this, the term polyarchy was coined to indicate democracy. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the countries of Eastern Europe moved towards the democratic system, and the Balkan countries also, considered them countries in transition to democracy. According to Carothers, it is incorrect to speak of Countries in transition to democracy referring to any state that abandons the dictatorial form of government moving into who knows which direction. Also, as long as you are aware of the fact that a democratic country does not exist in a day, it is, however, to remember that consolidation of a democratic regime is not automatic and that we must accept the fact that a State can place itself in a grey position that can last for years and that in any case before speaking of consolidated democracy, it can alternate democratic moments, followed by new authoritarian phenomena. In essence, holding elections is not enough to be a democracy. Albania was a dictatorial country, and after the 90s it started the road to democratization. Although more than three decades have passed, it continues to be a hybrid regime. Can we consider that the new authoritarian phenomena have followed in Albania as well?
 
 Received: 05 April 2023 / Accepted: 10 May 2023 / Published: 20 May 2023

Social Democracy's Muted Revival

AbstractAfter a long malaise, social democracy is making a muted revival. What is the place of social democracy in the political and economic order that is emerging from the Covid‐19 pandemic, and the economic crisis that has followed in its wake? Patterns have begun to emerge across the party family that are indicative of how social democracy is defining itself for the period to come. This article briefly surveys the revival of social democracy in three countries that have been historic bastions of the creed: Germany, Britain and Australia. It considers three particularly potent trends in this social democratic moment that reveal the movement's current character and the challenges it faces: building an ongoing coalition amid changing electorates; seeking transformation in an era of constraint; and a lack of ideological coherence. It considers what this muted resurgence suggests about the prospects for the centre‐left.

KPD Maphalla’s autobiographical poetry: narrating oneself in verse

Self-writing is a literary site that seeks to interrogate issues of subjectivity, experience and laying oneself bare. Its proponents immerse themselves in a particular spatial and temporal frame such as the colonial times, the apartheid era and the democratic moment. There are autobiographical writings that celebrate individual consciousness, style and experience during the apartheid era in South Africa. This article investigates how, from a selection of his poetry, KPD Maphalla ‘narrates himself in verse’, where the focus is to distinguish Maphalla the author (the narrator) from Maphalla the character (the narrated, the self-referent). The article considers the autobiographical elements of theme and style as conveyors of the meeting place between the narrator and the narrated in Maphalla’s poetry.

Critical Theory and the Democratic Moment

Critical Theory and the Democratic Moment

Sungmoon Kim’s Democracy After Virtue

Sungmoon Kim’s <i>Democracy After Virtue</i>

Form of Life, Buddhism, and Human Rights

Stanley Cavell took up anthropological works for consideration in a way that we might characterize as staccato, and has informed anthropological work in increasing and increasingly sustained ways. As these works show, it is difficult to lift, so to speak, a single concept—say, the ordinary—out of Cavell’s work, and treat it as if it were discrete, unentangled with neighboring concepts like language, or the uncanny, or nextness, to suggest only a few candidates. Still, what I will do here is highlight the fertility of Cavell’s elaboration on Wittgenstein’s ‘form of life’ for my ethnographic work on human rights in Thailand. I set out to show that were we to attend only to the register of cultural forms (more or less specifiable sets of customs, traditions, norms, values, habituated practices), as human rights debates that hew to cultural relativisim or ‘Asian values’ do, we would develop a partial view of how human rights emerged in the progressive, democratic moment surrounding and following the 1997 Thai constitution. More narrowly, the case I make, the case that one cannot make if one only takes form of life in the conventional sense of describing only social conventions, is that a central line of thought in the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand about what human rights were turned not on the nature of rights, but on a picture of the human. The picture at issue was one importantly inscribed within a certain, controversial school of Buddhist thinking. This paper will examine specific contests within Buddhism over what a human being is, with the particular claims to rights that flow from different pictures of the human. That is, it will take these debates, as they appeared in struggles over human rights, as pitching irreconcilable notions of the human form of life against one another. First, though, it is necessary to provide some orientation for readers unfamiliar with Thailand.

From ‘fugitive democracy’ to ‘fugitive justice’: Cultivating a democratic ethos

Sheldon S. Wolin’s ‘fugitive democracy’ is arguably his most provocative contribution to political theory. Breaking with the understanding of democracy as a constitutional form whose origins he locates in the work of Aristotle, Wolin claims democracy is better understood not as a constitution, but as a ‘rebellious moment,’ making democracy dependent on cultural rather than institutional characteristics. This formulation poses a problem for democracy as a political phenomenon, as political power today tends to be concentrated within institutions. Without institutional expression, democracy is alienated from political power and hence a contradiction in terms. I reconstruct an understanding of Wolin’s fugitive democracy that can avoid such problems, while also being adequate to the current political juncture. I argue that Aristotle’s conception of the practice of justice, read through the lens of Wolin’s ‘fugitive democracy,’ becomes ‘fugitive justice,’ the cultivation of a democratic ethos that might support and sustain fortuitous democratic moments, connecting democratic culture to political institutions. In this way, Aristotle’s work is split: not simply the founder of constitutionalism, through ‘fugitive justice’ Aristotle becomes a resource for radical democrats, and a complement to Wolin’s concept of democracy.

Lefort e a questão da igualdade

Neste artigo, pretendemos tratar do tema da igualdade em dois momentos do pensamento de Lefort, aqui designados respectivamente de momento republicano e momento democrático. Buscaremos circunscrever os significados que a igualdade adquire em cada um deles. Nossa hipótese é de que não há propriamente discrepância, mas a diferença é derivada do problema que determina a investigação, que é determinada, ora pela questão dos fundamentos do poder, ora pelos rumos da democracia.

Ivan Vladislavić’s Aesthetics of Detritus in “Autopsy” and “Propaganda by Monuments”

In this article, I examine detritus as a central trope for post-transitional South African society, an idea that, I argue, has particular relevance for Ivan Vladislavić’s second short story collection, Propaganda by Monuments. As a point of departure, I use Leon de Kock’s idea of the “democratic moment” – the moment of radical globalization coinciding with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the crumbling of apartheid bureaucracy. In this new “democratic” age, cultural detritus – remnants, fragments and addenda – begins to circulate and litter transnational contexts, finding its way into the unlikeliest of spaces, producing cultural resonances, echoes and cross-talk. In Propaganda by Monuments, detritus carries exotic charges of meaning, and allows for alternative ways of seeing the urban landscape in the new democratic era, in which the nation state has begun its process of dissipation. As such, Propaganda by Monuments can perhaps be read as a prelude to Vladislavić’s third collection of stories, 101 Detectives, in which the detritus has been swept away, and polished surfaces are angled towards the protagonists, and the reader, narrowing their margins for subjectivity and self-styling. Keywords: Ivan Vladislavić, “Autopsy,” “Propaganda by Monuments,” aesthetics of detritus, post-transitional South Africa

New city, new citizens?: A Lefebvrian exploration of state-led housing and political identities in Luanda, Angola

Since its inauguration in 2011, the New City of Kilamba has become one of the most emblematic examples of the Chinese-funded spectacle of reconstruction in post-war Angola. Its tabula rasa urban paradigm has been widely criticised by housing experts in and out of Angola but little is known of its reception by the general population in Luanda. This article retraces the incremental appropriation of Kilamba City by its residents in order to question how the occupation of a new city shapes the relationship between ordinary city-dwellers and the state. Based on direct observation in Luanda and media monitoring since 2011, the article unveils a multi-faceted reality where residents express at the same time pride and preoccupation, satisfaction and uncertainty. It uses Henri Lefebvre’s notion of ‘production of space’ to suggest that the conundrums of the new city could contribute to the emergence of a democratic moment in Angola.

“I Will Vote What Is in My Heart”: Sierra Leone’s 2012 Elections and the Pliability of “Normative” Democracy

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)November 17, 2012 was national election day in the West African country of Sierra Leone. My friend Musa and I walked down Lunsar Road, a main thoroughfare in the provincial capital of Makeni, speaking in hushed tones so that our conversation would not echo in the desolate streets. The normally bustling neighborhoods were silent and deserted. Stores were shuttered, the sidewalk was empty of its usual crowd of traders and children, and the road itself hosted only the occasional official election vehicle, speeding from one polling station to the next. The stillness was broken only by the occasional residents ambling along in twos and threes, wearing their biometric voter ID cards on red lanyards around their necks, the telltale sign of India ink-marking that they had voted-on their right index fingers. The new laws governing public conduct on election day banned commerce, organized public activity, and vehicle travel until the polling stations closed at 7 p.m. And so the voters, many of whom had been queuing at their respective stations since five in the morning, walked home in the silence, and waited.The overwhelming stillness and my concomitant sense of unease were interrupted briefly by a call of, Musa! How are you? from a woman walking across the street. Musa and his friend met in the middle of the empty road and greeted each other. She was making her way home from voting, and was beaming. She was not unsettled by the stark surroundings; in fact she reveled in them, remarking on how wonderful, how amazing the town looked. As they chatted, Musa and his friend smiled and laughed, gesturing intermittently to an empty trading stall or to a silent workshop. They congratulated one another on keeping the peace, both anticipating that, as a result of people upholding the drastic curtailment of everyday freedoms, the elections would be pronounced free and fair, with minimal grumbling about tampering or irregularities from the losing parties. Musa's friend noted that she was glad that visitors (gesturing to me) were here to see their in action. She hoped I was pleased.The exceptional nature of this ostensibly productive, successful democratic moment invites many questions about what normative looks like. As the 2012 elections were Sierra Leone's first self-organized election since the 1980s, they were considered a huge test of the country's (Doyle 2012). The civil war had ended in 2002, and in the intervening decade, the United Nations had organized or run every election. To create a perfect election, in the words of several citizens, parliament passed comprehensive election laws that imposed restrictive new limits on assembly, free speech, and movement. The new laws created designated campaign days, increased oversight for party registration and activity, and banned political speech, dress, and activity during polling, a day in which commercial activity in urban areas was also forbidden. The curtailments of everyday freedoms were roundly criticized by international election observers as inconsistent with the core tenets of and human rights (Carter Center 2012a, European Union 2012). However, every foreign observer mission declared the election free, fair, and transparent, noting that the country was consolidating its democracy (European Union 2012:7). Sierra Leoneans were also satisfied, as the election was legitimized by the international community, and also conformed with local historical emphases on public shows of unity. The ugly side of political negotiations were dissimulated into covert spheres (Ferme 1999), which was considered the proper place for potentially divisive arguing, even as Sierra Leoneans deem these practices conducive to corruption precisely because of their opacity (see Richards 1996: 19).Sierra Leonean lawmakers invited international observer missions precisely because these missions have the power to adjudicate the quality of a nation's election and, by extension, its democracy. …

The British General Election of 2015 and the Rise of the Meritocracy

AbstractMany on the left hoped that the 2015 general election in Britain would prove a social democratic moment. Instead, it proved a nationalist moment, since the only parties radically to increase their vote were UKIP and the SNP. This mirrored trends on the Continent, where nationalist parties on the right and the left have been the beneficiaries of the financial collapse of 2008. These parties exploit a new social cleavage between those who benefit from globalisation and those left behind. The new parties exploit issues of identity rather than economics, and these issues—whether Britain remains in the European Union, whether mass immigration continues and whether Scotland remains in the United Kingdom—are likely to dominate the 2015 parliament.

The ‘Co‐Originality’ of Constituent Power and Representation

Mass protests as a way to vent popular dissent are not a new phenomenon. Yet, the recent events both in the Arab world and in the U.S. and Europe, where people took the streets to respectively revolt against their corrupt dictators and against capitalist excesses, have placed before us once again the question of such mass mobilizations and their role in society. How do these ‘revolutionary’ moments function with regard to established regimes? Are these protests indeed, as their protagonists claim, ‘authentic’ democratic moments when the demos, in its pure physicality, gathers on a public square? Or should these protests, rather, be seen as temporary anomalies and interruptions of democracy’s regular functioning? What all recent protesters share is their common stance against instituted powers. Their political activism thrives on an explicit abhorrence of established elites, as manifested by the slogan ‘They don’t represent us!’ of the Occupy and Indignados movements. 2 This combination of rash anti-representational feelings and the apparent dynamic of a pouvoir constituant demands a closer philosophical exploration of the interrelation between representation and constituent power. In fact, the common sentiment among Occupiers and Indignados has clear links to contemporary theories of constituent power. Authors such as Antonio Negri or Andreas Kalyvas strongly emphasize the role of ‘the people’, ‘the multitude’ or ‘the sovereign as constituent power’, they clearly distrust traditional representative procedures, and they call for a more direct role of the demos instead. Thus, for these authors, direct involvement of the people is the normative ideal, whereas democratic representation is equated with an almost Schumpeterian system of institutionalized elite rule that claims to be democratic by virtue of the sheer fact that those in power are subject to regular elections. Equating representation with institutionalized electoral politics, though, unduly restricts the meaning of the term ‘representation’ and risks overlooking that the dynamics of

The World Is Not Enough

The World Is Not Enough Woody Holton (bio) Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. xxii + 673 pp. Notes and index. $150.00. Of all my on-campus interviews that failed to turn into jobs, I can only blame globalism for one. Things were going well until I sat down with the search committee to discuss the American Revolution syllabus I had sent ahead. I had developed a technique called “contrasting twins,” in which student essay-writers hunt for un-obvious differences between two superficially similar texts—say, two biographies of Mercy Otis Warren or the first and final drafts of the Declaration of Independence. I emphasized my commitment to this method of eliciting students’ originality by entitling my syllabus, “The Era of the American Revolution: A Comparative Approach.” Big mistake. The committee members interpreted the three words I had tacked onto my course title as promising comparison between the American War of Independence and other world revolutions. They thought they had found themselves a global-ist—until they got to know me. I might well have landed that job if I could have reached into the future for a copy of The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution. From the first essay (P. J. Marshall’s “Britain’s American Problem: The International Perspective”) to the last (Leora Auslander’s “America’s Cultural Revolution in Transnational Perspective”), this book’s global emphasis makes it very different from anthologies and reference works on the Founding era published as recently as ten years ago. Some of the authors weigh Americans’ activities and experiences between 1775 and 1783 against those of distant peoples (mostly in Great Britain and its Caribbean colonies). Others discuss the war’s impact on Britain. Auslander compares the American and French Revolutionaries’ use of clothing as a political statement. And so on. Editors Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky highlight the book’s transnational focus with their choice of cover art: John Singleton Copley’s painting of a Revolutionary War battle that was fought not in North America but on the British island of Jersey, just off the French coast, on January 6, 1781. The combatants are British and French; [End Page 32] the only soldier with an apparent connection to the thirteen rebel colonies is the dying British commander’s black servant. Almost inevitably, placing the War of Independence in global context diminishes it. The Handbook authors portray Britain’s impact on North America in the years after 1783 as heavier than most people realize, especially in the areas of commerce—Henry Clay once called the American states the “independent colonies of England” since they were still “commercially slaves” (p. 475)—and culture. (The citizens of the new nation preferred British novels to those written by their fellow Americans.) On the other hand, the British footprint was surprisingly light in 1763, and putting these two corrections together forces us to revise downward our estimate of how far toward independence the Revolution moved America. Widening the lens to take in the rest of the world is only one of the ways in which most of these authors make the War of Independence seem smaller. In their introduction, the editors endorse Gordon S. Wood’s characterization of the American Revolution as radical, and Allan Kulikoff celebrates farmers’ success at parlaying their indispensible military contribution into substantial democratization. But most of the other authors imply that the radicalism of the American Revolution has been greatly exaggerated. Michael Zuckerman undermines Wood’s “before” picture, using Dr. Alexander Hamilton’s eye-opening 1744 journey through the North American colonies to show that they were already very different from the mother country three decades before the Declaration of Independence. (As Zuckerman notes, Hamilton was accompanied by his slave Dromo—a reminder about the foundations of America’s white male egalitarianism.) Terry Bouton, Ray Raphael, and Christopher Tomlins all argue that the “Democratic Moment,” as Raphael calls it, was temporary. Raphael even offers the stunning surmise that ordinary freemen “were never again so directly in charge of their effective governing apparatus as they were during the brief period after British rule had begun...

Os partidos de oposição e seu papel fiscalizador (1995-1999)

It focus on the National Congress as redemocratization brought a revitalization process and, since the nineties, the Brazilian Legislative Branch has been analyzed through various studies in the Political Science area. This paper brings two manners of analysis: (a) the first has the aim of analyzing the Brazilian Congress’ structure and modus operandi, showing a comparison between two different moments: the authoritarian period and the subsequent democratic moment; and (b) study the group of legislative decisions taken by the opposition parties, aiming to check the government acts between 1995 and 1999.

European elections in the media: portuguese coverage of the 2009 european elections

For this year’s European elections, the European Parliament (EP) has chosen the motto “this time it’s different”. But is it really? Despite the new elements that will make these elections innovative and different in terms of the EU’s architectural framework, the main issue will probably be – as in previous elections – the fact that the citizens are not aware about the role of the European Parliament, let alone the novelties introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon that seem to have granted it more effective powers. The argument being that only the media can help reach a widespread audience of European citizens and thus foster participation at these elections, we will look at the media coverage given by some Portuguese newspapers to the EP elections in 2009. Although it is still early to carry an analysis of the current media coverage for the 2014 EP elections, this will give us a basis for future comparison between these two major democratic moments.

Review: The democratic moment in American political thought

Books Reviewed in this issue.RECOMMENDED READINGTalking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v Board of Education Danielle AllenThe Imperative of Integration Elizabeth AndersonEmergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy Bonnie HonigMachiavellian Democracy John P McCormickTwo Cheers for Anarchism James ScottDemocracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism Sheldon Wolin

Positioning community art practices in urban cracks

This article addresses the position of community art practices and the role of practitioners in urban cracks. Community art practices raise possibilities for a reconceptualisation of the concept of community and an extension of the concept of art in public space. Urban cracks are conceptualised as spatial, temporal and relational manifestations of changing dynamics in the city, in which different logics and needs conflict. Urban cracks can be seen as tempting urban spaces for adult educators and artists because they have the possibility to challenge the consensus over living together in the city, to fuel collective learning processes and democratic moments and to make urban spaces more ‘public’. Therefore practitioners in community art need to make an investment in reading and analysing the social and spatial context of their work. In this view, community art practices position themselves as a contextualised praxis in the community: not only working in but also working with this context.