http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6449-8966
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Abstract
We shed light on the discontent with and the appeal of democracy by interviewing some of the most committed critical citizens: core activists in street protests. Based on interviews in Athens, Cairo, London, and Moscow, we found that they rejected representative democracy as insufficient, and believed democracy to entail having a voice and a responsibility to participate intensively in political decision-making. Activists saw themselves as engaged in prefigurative politics by fostering democratic practices within the movement and, ultimately, in society, but also raised concerns about internal power dynamics reproducing existing inequalities and exclusions. The insistence by activists that citizens have both a right and a duty to participate should be taken more seriously by political scientists and policymakers, not just as a threat to democracy and democratization, but as an opportunity. However, contemporary social movements are not straightforward sites of prefiguration, but sites of struggle between experimental and traditional forms of organizing, between inclusive aspirations and exclusive tendencies.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Irum S. Ali, Meta De Lange, Evelina Gyulkhandanyan, Donna Middelkoop, and Christina Psarra for their research assistance. We are also grateful to our colleagues Geoffrey Pleyers and Anne Le Huérou for their assistance with the research in Moscow.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Armine Ishkanian http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6449-8966
Notes
1 Bauman and Bordoni, State of Crisis; Fukuyama, “Why Is Democracy Performing So Poorly?”; Plattner, “Is Democracy in Decline?”
2 Nugent, “Commentary,” 281.
3 Flinders, “The Problem with Democracy,” 181.
4 Crick and Lockyer, Active Citizenship.
5 Norris, Democratic Deficit.
6 Holston, Insurgent Citizenship.
7 Merkel, “Is There a Crisis of Democracy?”
8 Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession”; Fukuyama, “Why Is Democracy Performing So Poorly?”
9 Schmitter, “Crisis and Transition, but Not Decline,” 43.
10 Flinders, “The Problem with Democracy.”
11 Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy; Nugent, “Commentary”; Della Porta, Social Movements in Times of Austerity; Merkel, “Is Capitalism Compatible with Democracy?,” 1; Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism.
12 Badiou and Gauchet, What Is to Be Done?; Brown, Undoing the Demos; Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy; Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism.
13 Lummis, Radical Democracy, 15.
14 Schmitter, “Crisis and Transition, but Not Decline,” 43.
15 Haldane, “A Leaf Being Turned.”
16 Fukuyama, “Why Is Democracy Performing So Poorly?,” 19.
17 Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, 143.
18 Bauman and Bordoni, State of Crisis.
19 Gandhi and Lust-Okar, “Elections under Authoritarianism”; Schedler, The Politics of Uncertainty.
20 Calhoun, “Occupy Wall Street in Perspective”; Graeber, The Democracy Project; Tejerina et al., “From Indignation to Occupation”; Springer, “Public Space as Emancipation.”
21 Biekart and Fowler, “Transforming Activisms 2010+.”
22 Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope.
23 Springer, “Public Space as Emancipation.”
24 Graeber, The Democracy Project; Pleyers, Alter-Globalization; Maeckelbergh, “Doing Is Believing”; Yates, “Rethinking Prefiguration.”
25 Graeber, The Democracy Project, xv.
26 Springer, “Public Space as Emancipation,” 554.
27 Holston, Insurgent Citizenship; Blaug, “Outbreaks of Democracy”; Bayat, How Ordinary People Change the Middle East; Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy.”
28 Blaug, “Outbreaks of Democracy,” 148.
29 Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 23.
30 Bayat, How Ordinary People Change the Middle East; Holston, Insurgent Citizenship.
31 We use this term, rather than democracy, to denote “free and fair elections,” since contestation of the meaning of democracy constitutes the object of our inquiry.
32 Bobel, “I’m Not An Activist,” 148.
33 All names have been changed and pseudonyms are used to refer to the interviewees. See table of respondents in the appendix.
34 Ishkanian and Glasius, “Resisting Neoliberalism?”
35 Pleyers, Alter-Globalization; Maeckelbergh, “Doing Is Believing”; Graeber, “The New Anarchists”; Yates, “Rethinking Prefiguration.”
36 Ince, “In the Shell of the Old.”
37 Glasius and Pleyers, “The Global Moment of 2011,” 557.
38 Polletta, Freedom is an Endless Meeting; Meyer and Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations.”
39 Choi-Fitzpatrick, “Managing Democracy in Social Movement Organizations”; Martinez Palacios, “The Sex of Participatory Democracy.”
40 Tadros, “Contentious and Prefigurative Politics.”
41 Della Porta, Social Movements in Times of Austerity.
42 Schmitter, “Crisis and Transition.”
43 Finkel and Brudny, “No More Colour!”
44 As well as hybrid regimes: see Weiss, “Going to the Ground (or AstroTurf),” on the interplay between democratic deficits in society and in government.
45 Sbicca and Perdue, “Protest through Presence.”
46 Power, “Dangerous Subjects.”
47 See for instance Aslanidis and Kaltwasser, “Dealing with Populists in Government,” on the recent Greek experience.
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Armine Ishkanian
Armine Ishkanian is an assistant professor in social policy and the Programme Director of the MSc in Social Policy & Development in the Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her main research interests are in civil society, democracy building, social justice, and development.
Marlies Glasius
Marlies Glasius is a professor in international relations at the Department of Politics, University of Amsterdam. Her main research interests are in global civil society, international criminal justice, human security, and authoritarian rule.