Decolonizing Democratic Innovations

Abstract

Efforts to expand the academic literature and curricula have increasingly appropriated decolonization discourses, often reducing them to an attempt to reconcile and respond to white “guilt and complicity” (Tuck and Yang, 2012). In doing so, decolonization has become an easy ‘metaphor’ that recenters whiteness; forms “clientelist networks with indigenous and black intellectuals” (Cusicanqui, 2012); and supplants “ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives” (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Understanding decolonization not as a metaphor but as the actual restitution of deliberative autonomy (Segato, 2010) and territories (Tuck and Yang, 2012) demands deliberative democracy to repair its colonial complicities and dependencies to build “a future-oriented project” (Ò Táíwò, 2021). This panel builds upon scholarly conversations on how democratic innovations reinforce the legacies of colonialism and other ongoing colonial endeavors, and in doing so, further oppress indigenous peoples and other racialized communities. We invite papers that analyze: • What does it mean to decolonize democratic innovations in theory and in practice? • What are the contradictions and complicities of the deliberative project? • Can deliberative institutions be decolonized or a means of decolonization? • and/or analyze processes that stand against the ongoing colonial project—spaces in which indigenous, black, and Asian peoples meet and become “deliberative subjects” (Cumes, 2017) in absence, in resistance, or despite the Nation-State. We will hold a collective discussion during this panel.

Title	Details
Decolonizing Deliberative Democracy	View Paper Details
Decolonizing Deliberative Mini-Publics	View Paper Details
Deliberating Native Title	View Paper Details
Accounting for colonialism and culture in innovating democracy: Challenges, shortcomings – and a research agenda	View Paper Details
Representing Refugees in Democratic Innovations?	View Paper Details