Democracy

The focus of the Democracy theme, led by the Director of IHSS (2019-2022) Professor Simon Reid-Henry, was on three programmes of work running from 2018 to 2020. The aim was to encourage cross-disciplinary engagement within and across each of these three categories, with a view to developing future work on democracy across the Faculty. Events shone a spotlight on both the tensions and possibilities of democratic politics from historical, comparative and theoretical perspectives.

The three Democracy sub-themes were: 

1. Actors and Institutions - it addressed recent institutional changes within liberal democratic polities. This included attention to the institutions of capitalist democracy, such as the media, finance and debt, and to the gendered and classed nature of democratic politics. It also included a focus on the emergence of new parties of movement.
2. Scales of Democracy - it explored how democracy was imagined and articulated by different actors across different political scales, be this regional variations in democratic procedure, grassroots mobilisations, the articulation of political obligation at the supra-national scale, or the challenges of “direct democracy”. Practicing Democracy in the Neighbourhood (in conjunction with the City Centre) was one of the planned events.
3. Democracy’s Values - this theme addressed different ways in which democracy was imagined and acted upon, be this comparative examinations of forms of political rule, investigation into specific democratic techniques, such as “militant democracy”, the role of myth in the functioning of democratic knowledge or counter-democratic arts of the political such as “security” and the primacy accorded notions of “free speech”. Here the impact on older democratic norms of new platforms such as digitalisation, and issues of socio-economic structure and inclusion were considered. Planned events included: The Politics of Collective Obligations.