Recent years have seen contestations of democracy all around the globe. Democracy is challenged as a political as well as a normative term, and as a form of governance. Against the background of neoliberal transformation, populist mobilization, and xenophobic exclusion, but also of radical and emancipatory democratic projects, this collection offers a variety of critical and challenging perspectives on the condition of democracy in the 21st Century.
The volumes provide theoretical and empirical enquiries into the meaning and practice of liberal democracy, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the consequences for citizenship and everyday lives. With a pronounced focus on national and transnational politics and processes, as well as postcolonial and settler-colonial contexts, individual contributions scrutinize the role of democratic societies, ideals, and ideologies of liberal democracy within global power geometries. By employing the multiple meanings of The Condition of Democracy, the collection addresses the preconditions of democratic rule, the state this form of governance is in, and the changing ways in which citizens can (still) act as the sovereign in liberal democratic societies.
The books offer both challenging theoretical perspectives and rigorous empirical findings of how to conceive of democracy in our times, which will appeal to academics and students in social and political science, economics and international relations amongst other fields. The focus on developments in the Middle East and North Africa will furthermore be of great usefulness to academics and the wider public interested in the repercussions of western democracy promotion as well as in contemporary struggles for democratization 'from below'.
Jürgen Mackert is Professor of Sociology and co-director of the 'Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Pluralism' at Potsdam University, Germany. His research interests include sociology of citizenship, political economy, closure theory, collective violence. Recent publication: Social life as struggle: exclusionary politics and the possibility of solidary counterstrategies, SOZIALPOLITIK.CH (2021).
Hannah Wolf is a Researcher and Lecturer at the Chair for General Sociology at the University of Potsdam, and associate member at the DFG-collaborative research centre "Re-Figuration of Spaces". Her research interests include urban sociology, theories of space and place, and citizenship studies. Latest publication: Am Ende der Globalisierung: Über die Refiguration von Räumen (ed. with Martina Löw, Volkan Sayman and Jona Schwerer), 2021, transcript.
Bryan S. Turner is Research Professor of Sociology at the Australian Catholic University (Sydney), Emeritus Professor at the Graduate Center CUNY, Honorary Max Planck Professor Potsdam University Germany, and Research Fellow the Edward Cadbury Center, University of Birmingham, UK. He holds a Cambridge Litt.D. In 2020 with Rob Stones he published Successful Societies: Decision-making and the quality of attentiveness, British Journal of Sociology, 71(1), 183-202.
