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In a world where the impact of internal conflicts is spreading ever wider, there is a real need to rethink how democratic ideals and institutions can best be implemented. This book responds to this challenge by showing that deliberative democracy has crucial, but largely untapped, normative implications for societies deeply divided along ethnic lines. Its central claim is that deliberative norms and procedures can enable the citizens of such societies to build and sustain a stronger sense of common national identity. More specifically, the book argues that the deliberative requirements of reciprocity and publicity can enable citizens and representatives to strike an appropriate balance between the need to recognise competing ethnic identities and the need to develop a common civic identity centred on the institutions of the state. Although the book is primarily normative, it supports its claims with a broad range of empirical examples, drawn from cases such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, Macedonia, Northern Ireland and South Africa. The book also considers the normative implications of deliberative democracy for questions of institutional design. It argues that power-sharing institutions should be conceived in a way that allows citizens as much freedom as possible to shape their own relation to the polity. Crucially, this freedom can enable them to reconstruct their relationship to each other and to the state in ways that ultimately strengthen and sustain the transition from ethnic conflict to democracy.

This book presents an analysis of the nature of democratic theory, focusing on the prevalence of pious discourses of democracy in contemporary politics. Democracy is now promoted in religious terms to such an extent that it has become sacrosanct in Western political theory. The book argues that such piety relies on unsophisticated political analysis, paying scant attention to the complex conditions of contemporary politics. The contention is that it is more useful to think of democracy in terms of the centrality of political disagreement and its propensity to generate political violence. This argument is exemplified by the ways in which democracy and violence have been conceptualised in the war on terrorism. The book challenges democratic piety through the application of key contemporary approaches in political theory, including complexity theory, post-structuralism, and the idea of radical democracy. It uses the work of theorists such as Jacques Ranciére, William Connolly, Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, and Alain Badiou to interrogate the discourses of democracy that characterise contemporary political debate. Finally, the book grounds the theoretical analysis of democratic discourse with examples from contemporary politics such as the struggles for recognition of refugees and asylum seekers.

This book addresses the idea of radical democracy and, in particular, its poststructuralist articulation. It analyses the approach to radical democracy taken by a number of contemporary theorists and political commentators, including Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, William Connolly, Jacques Ranciére, Claude Lefort, Sheldon Wolin, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Giorgio Agamben. By examining critically the accounts of democracy advanced by these theorists, the book explores how a more radically conceived theory of democracy might be extended in a more egalitarian and inclusive direction. It draws on the insights of radical democratic theory to explore a range of concrete political cases (e.g. the struggles of indigenous people, same-sex marriage, societies emerging from prolonged social and political strife, and the role of social movements in opposing processes of globalistion) in order to illustrate its practical nature.

Little over 200 years ago, a quarter of a century of warfare with an ‘outlaw state’ brought the great powers of Europe to their knees. That state was the revolutionary democracy of France. In the intervening period, there has been a remarkable transformation in the way democracy is understood and valued – today, it is the non-democratic states that are seen as rogue regimes. This book looks at the historical contrast between the strongly negative perceptions of democracy in the 18th century and the very high degree of acceptance and legitimacy in contemporary international politics. It considers democracy’s remarkable rise from obscurity to centre stage in contemporary international relations, and uses history as a foundation for developing a normative defence of democracy.

In an era where citizens of liberal democracies are becoming increasingly disillusioned, dissatisfied and disenfranchised by the dominant political institutions and decision-making processes in these polities, new ideas of how to deepen democracy, re-engage citizens and enhance decision-making legitimacy are required. This book suggests that a combination of deliberative democracy and associational democracy is both a normatively desirable and an empirically plausible solution to the complex problems present in contemporary societies – as well as being compatible with many recent trends in governance. The author argues that by combining deliberative with associational democracy, the weaknesses of each model alone are compensated by the other, allowing the key strengths of each to manifest themselves. The book goes further by offering a detailed set of original, institutional requirements for liberal democracies that, if adopted, will enable a deliberative and associational democracy to be realised in practice. It achieves this by starting off with first principles, considering arguments about why democracy is valuable and elaborating on why both deliberative and associational democracy – especially when combined – can enhance these normative principles, which make democracy and its required revitalisation so important.