Democratic repertoires of prefigurative politics at a local level

Deadline: extended to 15 April 2024.

Final publication: 1 April de 2025.

Languages: English, Spanish

Absrtract

The literature on democracy is rich in theorising and reflecting on the various tendencies that threaten it. Thus, it is common to find positions that emphasise democracy "in crisis". In this regard, we can read outstanding works such as, for example, Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy (2004), Colin Hay, Why We Hate Politics (2007), Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018). How Democracies Die or Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, Never Ending Nightmare: How Neoliberalism Dismantles Democracy (2019). However, other approaches have pointed out that democracy seems to be undergoing a series of transformations in terms of the forms of citizen participation, whether through processes of monitoring power (Keane, 2009) or direct action (Tormey, 2015). Thus, rather than being (merely) in crisis, democracy can also be undergoing a process of transformation that is linked above all to a broadening of the political repertoires employed by civil society. The demos increasingly express itself not only through electoral channels, about which there seems to be a certain disaffection (Mair, 2015), but also through other channels and other forms of political expression. Thus, for example, linked to pro-democracy movements, acampadas (occupations of public squares) have proliferated in several countries as forms of political expression and experimentation. Also, the revival of instruments such as sortition for the selection of representatives is a mechanism that is being recovered in various contexts. At the same time, actors specialising in monitoring and scrutinising the centres of power from civil society also have been part of the political expression of several social groups. In the wake of the wave of square occupations, various experiments with new political practices were brought together in municipalist movements that arguably created their own political repertoire. A constitutive part of this repertoire is the prefigurative function of their political experiences. Another important element appears to be a revival of the local (often urban) and trans-local level as the proper stratum of this political repertoire.  

This special issue seeks to attract papers that reflect on or analyse different repertoires and forms of political expression that have been experimented with or consolidated in recent decades. The focus has a special interest in the local space due to the growing confidence in being able to transform a globalised world also from the most immediate and close reality.

The topics of interest include issues such as:

Municipalism and citizen participation

Alternative forms of economy: cooperatives and other experiences

Innovative experiences of citizen participation at the local level

Radical democracy and/or council democracy

Social movements and deliberative experiences

Squatting movements and the right to the city