This paper introduces a larger cooperative project that is being carried out by an international team of researchers, some of whom are presenting papers in the framework of this section. The project examines the role played by the idea of democracy in the current debate about the future world order. This paper aims to provide a theoretical background to this exercise by assessing the contributions made by various contemporary theoretical approaches to studying the democratic discourse. In particular, it analyses the insights gained by poststructuralist hegemony theory and postcolonial studies and assesses the possibility of combining the two approaches. In the process, it is trying to demonstrate that if democracy is to remain a meaningful notion in the contemporary world, it has to be defined on a larger international scale, beyond the limits imposed by the nation state or the world state perspectives.
