Decolonizing Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative democracy advances an emancipatory project of inclusion, equality, and freedom. Yet these ideals have been produced in a particular economic and cultural context. Emerging out of the humanist Enlightenment tradition and inspired by linguistic and critical theories, deliberative democracy is deeply rooted in Western academia. This also means that despite its emancipatory impetus, it emerged in a context marked by colonial thinking. In this paper, we argue that if deliberative democracy is to unfold its full democratic potential, it needs to face the colonial traces it may carry within it. The article proposes six moves towards decolonizing deliberative democracy. In order not to remain in the a purely negative, deconstructive impetus of decolonization, we also want to sketch a positive, reconstructive way forward. Hence, the first three moves we are proposing are deconstructive and aim at deepening critical reflection while the other three moves mark a concrete starting point for a decolonial reconstruction of deliberative democracy. In proposing these six moves, we do not suggest that decolonizing is a task that can be simply completed, rather we understand decolonizing as a driving force that needs to be a permanent feature of the deliberative democratic project. On the deconstructive side, (1) the first move required is the acknowledgement of the violence often hidden by the narrative of modernity. Modernity is deeply dependent on colonial exploitation, racism and xenophobia. Beyond advocating equality as a moral principle, decolonized deliberative democracy requires an extensive critique of the economic inequalities pervading social life and their racial and gendered dimensions. (2) The second move consists of the recognition of the epistemic asymmetries within the knowledge production of deliberative democracy. The asymmetries that dominate academia have several layers of geographical, racial and gender divides cutting across this area of scholarship. This results in the exclusion of knowledges from the Global South as well as from marginalized groups. (3) A third deconstructive move involves reflecting on the colonial drive observable in current approaches to democratic innovations. New deliberative formats are often seen as technologies that can be replicated in any cultural context. The commodification of democracy may express one more form of colonial thinking, in which democracy is reduced to the export of successful innovations from one context to another. Deliberative democracy should be seen as a particular approach, grounded on very specific historic contexts and on some institutional settings that cannot by assumed as universal. Linked to these initial moves, we suggest three constructive ones: (1) we need to start by centring on social injustices cutting across democracies; (2) we need to look to the Global South in an actual dialogue, rather than extracting knowledge of exoticized cases; (3) we need to include marginalized groups and people outside academia into the theorizing process and empower their voices in the conceptualization of deliberative democracy.