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Democracy is one of the most influential and debated ideas in political theory. Although it has many different interpretations and historical forms, contemporary democratic theory is still mainly influenced by Western intellectual traditions. This prompts a key theoretical question: who has the right to determine what democracy truly means?
This panel aims to critically analyse how the meaning of democracy is evolving and to explore the underlying assumptions of prominent democratic theories. Rather than viewing democracy as a fixed institutional framework applicable everywhere, it is understood as a contested political concept that is continually shaped and reshaped.
The aim is not to negate the Western democratic canon or replace it with a single alternative, but to investigate whether democratic theory can incorporate multiple intellectual foundations. It also examines if political traditions outside the mainstream canon can influence the fundamental idea of democracy, rather than merely serving as empirical instances for current theories.
The panel invites theoretically grounded contributions that explore questions such as: What are the foundations for defining and understanding democracy? Who constitutes the democratic demos? What role do people play in a democracy? How do diverse conceptions of political communities shape our view of democratic self-rule? In what ways have feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, and subaltern scholars challenged traditional views of democratic subjecthood? Can political traditions from Indian, African, Asian, Islamic, or Indigenous societies offer alternative models of democratic self-rule? How should we interpret recent developments in populism, anti-politics, technocracy, and digital politics? Does anti-politics foster new political agency, or does it lead to democratic disengagement?
The panel invites submissions that go beyond simple descriptions of democracy and encourage conceptual, comparative, and historical analyses. Its aim is to investigate whether democratic theory can evolve into a more diverse intellectual framework—one that acknowledges diverse democratic traditions while maintaining core principles such as equality, participation, inclusion, accountability, contestation, and collective self-governance.