Democratization

The field of deliberative civic engagement is rapidly growing around the world—but it remains highly fragmented. Motivated by the widely recognized need to pool the collective experience and knowledge of scholars, practitioners, and advocates, this book represents the first comprehensive assessment of deliberative civic engagement. Each chapter in the book addresses a broad, yet specific “big question” about deliberative civic engagement, and reviews both published and unpublished writings across disciplines, settings, locations, and processes to assess what we know, how we know it, and what we do not yet know. Part I provides a broad overview of deliberative civic engagement, defining terms and examining the many organizations doing work related to deliberative civic engagement. Part II introduces the reader to process and design issues central to deliberative civic engagement, including questions about recruitment and participation, communication, inclusion and diversity, and the use of online tools. Part III examines issues integral to deliberative civic engagement, including questions about the impacts and outcomes of such processes for individuals, communities, and policy, and well as questions about the evaluation of such processes. Part IV concludes the book with two chapters. This book examines and responds to critics' concerns about deliberative civic engagement. The other draws together the work in the previous sections, examining uncertainties and unresolved questions, and looks to the future, developing an agenda for the advancement of the practice and study of deliberative civic engagement.

“Liberal democracy” is the name given to a regime that much of the world lives in or aspires to, and both liberal and deliberative theorists focus much of their intellectual energy on working to reshape and perfect this regime. But what if “liberal democracy” were a contradiction in terms? Taking up Jacques Rancière’s polemical claim that democracy is not a regime, Samuel Chambers argues that liberalism and democracy are not complements, but competing forces. By way of the most in-depth and rigorous treatment of Rancière’s writings to date, this book seeks to disentangle democracy from liberalism. Liberalism is a logic of order and hierarchy, of the proper distribution of responsibilities and rights, whereas democratic politics follows a logic of disordering that challenges and disrupts any claims that the allocation of roles could be complete. This book resists the tendency to collapse democracy into the broader terms of liberalism, by defending a vision of “impure” politics. chambers shows that there is no sphere proper to politics, no protected political domain. The job of political theory is therefore not to say what is required in order for politics to occur, not to develop ideal “normative” models of politics, and not even to create new political ontologies. Instead, political theory is itself an enactment of politics in Rancière’s sense of dissensus: politics thwarts any social order of domination. The book explores the possibility of a critical theory beyond unmasking and a democratic politics beyond liberalism.

Despite the global popularity of rights language, nagging suspicions remain about the compatibility between the practice of rights claiming and democracy. Does rights claiming advances democratic freedom and equality or does it undermine participatory practices while reinforcing dominant forms of power? Should marginalized individuals and groups make rights claims to challenge oppression and injustice or should they seek an alternative language and form of political contestation? Making Rights Claims provides a unique entrée into these important and timely questions. Rather than simply taking a side in the debates for or against rights claiming, Zivi argues that we first need to understand the relationship between rights and democracy anew. Combining insights from speech act theory with recent developments in democratic and feminist thought, she develops a theory of the performativity of rights claiming and argues that if we understand and study rights claims as speech acts that create the world they seem to represent, we will see that it is through rights claiming, that we constitute and reconstitute ourselves as democratic citizens, shape our communities, and transform constraining categories of identity in ways that may simultaneously advance and challenge aspects of democracy.