Democracies in the Land: A Geographic-Conceptual Approach to "Seeing" Democracies in the World

In 2009, Peter de Souza sent a memo to David Beetham. In it, he mentioned that "the caravan of democracy changes as it travels". This, of course, refers to how an idea of democracy becomes different as it is carried by people in different geographical locales and in different social contexts. The same goes for an idea of democracy travelling through time, such as how parliamentarianism has in the West evolved from, say, monthly gatherings in woods, fields, and tavern/mayoral halls, through to near daily gatherings in dedicated assembly buildings. There is no issue with what de Souza wrote to Beetham. However, it risks the incorrect view that any geographic locale or social context is a priori devoid of democratic practices and only becomes democratic to some extent or to some sense once an idea of it has been imported. It is my aim in this essay to demonstrate that this, if ever it were to happen, would be a rare occurrence, for as the caravan travels it passes through a series of landscapes, of diverse multi-specied micro-geographies, that do already perform democratic lifeways – especially ones that are often not matching the idea of democracy in the caravan that is passing through. I will demonstrate this through an ethological account of non-human democratic practices that I witnessed in the Australian desert.