Democracy as an essentially contested concept: opening the Pandora's Box?

Democracy is an essentially contested concept that, due to a Eurocentric hegemony of knowledge production, is received only very fragmentarily and in isolation in democratic theory and thus conceptually. Recognizing this, we want to respond with a globally compatible concept of democracy with the following steps: 1. identifying the core norms that define a concept of democracy on which all can agree. By 2. breaking down what we see as the constructed distinction between empiricism and theory and instead entering into a dialogue that 3. methodologically again leads into a loop of inductive and deductive approaches. Such a research endeavor is not an isolated project of a single scholar, but requires the joint effort of a group of intra- and interdisciplinary colleagues with similar research interests and a far greater pluralism of methods than political science has practiced to date.