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Civil War, Genocide and Beyond: How to Re-found the Narrative Framework on the Destruction of the Spanish Democratic Republic after 1936
Abstract
This article contends that the category of civil war is not suitable for studying the massacres of civilians during the Spanish 1936–1039 war and its aftermath. In trying to build an alternative narrative for the understanding of the destruction of the democratic republic of 1931 founded on the human rights paradigm, an analytical framework is devised based on the deficit in deliberation processes allowing for the re-classification of social constituencies as ontological enemies. By showing that the repression by Franco's followers supplemented institutional logics and rationalities from colonial warfare and religious wars, the article also provides insights for a qualitative differentiation in repression between the two contending sides.
In this article, I argue that persisting racial constructs in Spain affect conceptions of national belonging and continue to shape and permeate contemporary discriminations. I begin by describing several recent political events that demonstrate the urgent need for a discussion about “race” and racialization in the country. Second, some conceptual foundations are provided concerning constructs of race and the corollary processes of racism and racialization. Third, I present data from various public surveys and also from ethnographic research conducted in Spain on mixedness and multiraciality to demonstrate that social constructs of race remain a significant boundary driving stigmatization and discrimination in Spain, where skin color and other perceived physical traits continue to be important markers for social interaction, perceived social belonging, and differential social treatment. Finally, I bring race into the debate on managing diversity, arguing that a post-racial approach—that is, race-neutral discourse and the adoption of colorblind public policies, both of which are characteristic of the interculturalist perspectives currently preferred by Spain as well as elsewhere in Europe—fails to confront the enduring effects of colonialism and the ongoing realities of structural racism. I conclude by emphasizing the importance of bringing race into national and regional policy discussions on how best to approach issues of diversity, equality, anti-discrimination, and social cohesion.
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CITATION: Rodríguez-García, D. (2022) “The Persistence of Racial Constructs in Spain. Bringing Race and Colorblindness into the Debate on Interculturalism.” Social Sciences, 11(1):13. DOI: 10.3390/socsci11010013. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/11/1/13
Durante la pasada decada se ha incrementado el interes de los medios de comunicacion y de la sociedad civil espanola por la “memoria historica”, interes que se ha puesto de manifiesto, entre otras cosas, en algunos debates relacionados con el pasado reciente (1931-1981). En estos debates han participado historiadores profesionales y otros actores sociales, desde escritores y directores de cine a ciudadanos activistas. El presente ensayo analiza una de las interminables polemicas que tuvo lugar en la primavera de 2010 con el fin de destacar algunos problemas estructurales, especialmente la tendencia de parte de los creadores de opinion —incluidos historiadores academicos que actuan como figuras mediaticas— a monopolizar el derecho de “contar el pasado” a partir de la ingenua reivindicacion de que el conocimiento historico profesional procede de la verdad factual. La primera parte del ensayo aborda el papel de los historiadores y la historia academica en los medios. La segunda analiza la posicion etnocentrica que adoptan algunos intelectuales liberales espanoles cuando se enfrentan a la internacionalizacion de la justicia transicional. La tercera parte critica la manera en la que los “intelectuales mediaticos” en Espana impiden la discusion verdaderamente democratica del pasado colectivo.
The extermination that was associated with the violence of the Spanish Civil War period and the early 1940s has been studied in depth in recent decades. Until now, however, the concept of genocide has not been discussed with an eye to understanding and interpreting this violence. The hermeneutical and comparative potential of the concept is, however, unquestionable. This article aims both to contextualize the origin and development of the debates about the concept of genocide, and to show what the concept could add to the debate in the case of Spain. In particular, this paper proposes to apply the concept of genocidal practice to the study of the Francoist violence, through analysis of the discourses, the reasons for the violence, and the memories of the events. From this point of view, an analysis will be made of the relationship between the practice of genocidal violence and the discourses of denial devoted to preserving the impunity of the perpetrators to this very day in Spain.
This article focuses on two interrelated, but relatively ignored, factors in the Spanish transition to democracy (1975–78): first, the most important political mobilizations of the period in which the people demanded an amnesty for the political prisoners of the dictatorship; second, the presence of a collective memory of the Spanish civil war (1936–39), whose repetition was now to be avoided at all costs. It argues that the many collective actions that took place in Spain in favour of an amnesty were, to a great extent, inspired by a widespread desire for reconciliation among Spaniards. Spanish society had suffered a deep split as a consequence of the civil war and, because of the presence of the Francoist regime, no symbolic measures to reach national reconciliation had taken place. The climate generated by the often violent confrontations between police and demonstrators (and not only during demonstrations in favour of the amnesty), and the number of resulting deaths and injuries, made the people remember the serious problems of public order that had confronted the Second Republic (1931–36), whose collapse marked the beginning of the Spanish civil war. These factors help explain why the main political parties of the left felt the need to contain the very mobilization process that they had helped to create. The generous amnesty of October 1977, passed by a democratically elected parliament, was interpreted as the symbolic overcoming of the division among Spaniards that resulted from the dramatic civil confrontation of the 1930s.
This paper focuses on some of the issues that arise when one treats notions such as depersonalization, delegitimization and dehumanization as social practices. It emphasizes the importance of: (a) understanding depersonalizing, delegitimizing and dehumanizing constructions as embedded in descriptions of located spatial activities and moral standings in the world and (b) invoking and building a socio-moral order linked to notions of lesser humanity or non-humanity, (spatial) transgression and abjection. These concerns are illustrated by taking talk on Romanies as a case in point from interviews with Romanian middle-class professionals. It is argued that a focus on description rather than explanation might be more effective in understanding the dynamics of ideologies of moral exclusion.
In a world where the impact of internal conflicts is spreading ever wider, there is a real need to rethink how democratic ideals and institutions can best be implemented. This book responds to this challenge by showing that deliberative democracy has crucial, but largely untapped, normative implications for societies deeply divided along ethnic lines. Its central claim is that deliberative norms and procedures can enable the citizens of such societies to build and sustain a stronger sense of common national identity. More specifically, the book argues that the deliberative requirements of reciprocity and publicity can enable citizens and representatives to strike an appropriate balance between the need to recognise competing ethnic identities and the need to develop a common civic identity centred on the institutions of the state. Although the book is primarily normative, it supports its claims with a broad range of empirical examples, drawn from cases such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lebanon, Macedonia, Northern Ireland and South Africa. The book also considers the normative implications of deliberative democracy for questions of institutional design. It argues that power-sharing institutions should be conceived in a way that allows citizens as much freedom as possible to shape their own relation to the polity. Crucially, this freedom can enable them to reconstruct their relationship to each other and to the state in ways that ultimately strengthen and sustain the transition from ethnic conflict to democracy.
En los últimos años se está produciendo un creciente interés por el estudio de los victimarios. A diferencia de la víctima, el verdugo no suele testimoniar por voluntad propia, y si lo hace normalmente es para exonerarse de responsabilidad. Esta actitud plantea el problema de la voz enunciativa del victimario. Este artículo propone que la tarea de conocer acerca la identidad del perpetrador perfila un terreno para el intercambio entre la reflexión y la imaginación: el esbozo interdisciplinar de una antropología del verdugo. A través del tratamiento de este asunto en Las benévolas de Jonathan Littell, el texto muestra un ejemplo de cómo la literatura de ficción ofrece un marco para reflexionar acerca de las motivaciones de los perpetradores a partir de su actitud ante el testimonio. El objetivo último del artículo es no obstante señalar las dificultades que rodean la comprensión de los victimarios en el caso concreto de la guerra española de 1936–39 y sus secuelas. La reflexión sobre este asunto lleva a concluir que los problemas de conocimiento del perpetrador están menos en el objeto de estudio que en el propio observador. There is a growing interest in the study of perpetrators. As opposed to victims, victimizers tend not to be willing to testify, and when they do they exonerate themselves from responsibility. This attitude poses the issue of the voice of the perpetrator. This article claims that the task of knowing about the identity of the victimizer offers a terrain for exchanges between reflection and imagination: the interdisciplinary outline of an anthropology of the perpetrator. Through the approach to this issue in The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, the text shows an example of how fiction offers a framework for reflecting on the rationale of perpetrators by focusing on their attitude towards testimony. The final goal of the article is nevertheless to point out the difficulties surrounding the understanding of the victimizers in the case of the Spanish 1936–39 war and its sequels. Reflection on this issue leads to conclude that problems in the knowledge about the perpetrator are less in the object of study and rather more in the observer.
A new understanding of the nature of advanced industrial economies is derived from this extensive investigation of the ways in which the boundaries of the political have changed in Europe since the 1960s.
This is a study in English of the Carlist Movement, the extreme right-wing party in Spain, during the climactic decade of the 1930s. Carlism represents the oldest existing movement of the traditionalist right in Europe. In 1931 Carlists had already been in conflict with Spanish liberalism and leftism for over a century, seeking to reverse the trends of the nineteenth century and restore a religiously inspired corporative monarchy and harmonious society. During the 1930s they attacked and plotted the overthrow of the democratic Second Republic, participated in the rising of 1936 and then played a major political and military role within Nationalist Spain. Dr Blinkhorn discusses Carlism's internal politics, power struggles and sources of support; its ideology; its relations with other elements in the Spanish right, principally Falangism and Catholic conservatism; its attitude towards the Republic, liberalism and the left; its view of contemporary events elsewhere in Europe; its stress on paramilitarism and conspiracy against the Republican regime; and its wartime role.
A highly original history of the least understood and most intractable form of organised human aggression, from ancient Rome to our present conflict-ridden world We think we know civil war when we see it. Yet ideas of what it is, and isn't, have a long and contested history. Defining the term is acutely political, for ideas about what makes a war "civil" often depend on whether one is ruler or rebel, victor or vanquished, sufferer or outsider; it can also shape a conflict's outcome, determining whether external powers are involved or stand aside. From the American Revolution to the Iraq war, pivotal decisions have hung on such shifts of perspective. The West's age of civil war may be over, but elsewhere it has exploded - from the Balkans to Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Sri Lanka and, most recently, Syria. And the language of civil war has burgeoned as democratic politics has become more violently fought. This book's unique perspective on the roots, dynamics and shaping force of civil war will be essential to our ongoing struggles with this seemingly interminable problem.
The foundation of a stable democracy in Spain was built on a settled account: an agreement that both sides were equally guilty of violence, a consensus to avoid contention, and a pact of oblivion as the pathway to peace and democracy. That foundation is beginning to crack as perpetrators’ confessions upset the silence and exhumations of mass graves unbury new truths. It has become possible, even if not completely socially acceptable, to speak openly about the past, to disclose the testimonies of the victims, and to ask for truth and justice. Contentious coexistence that put political participation, contestation, and expression in practice has begun to emerge. This book analyzes how this recent transformation has occurred. It recognizes that political processes are not always linear and inexorable. Thus, it remains to be seen how far contentious coexistence will go in Spain.
Before getting to the matter at hand, I want to say how moving it is to read a set of papers that are committed so deeply to both democratic hopes and rational inquiry. Democratic commitments have not led the contributors to back off from the implications of their research, and commitments to rational inquiry have not provoked cynicism about political values. Putting aside the important lessons about deliberative democracy, there is much to be learned from this volume about the marriage of rational inquiry and moral-political conviction.
The Spanish Civil War has gone down in history for the horrific violence that it generated. The climate of euphoria and hope that greeted the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy was utterly transformed just five years later by a cruel and destructive civil war. Here Julián Casanova, one of Spain's leading historians, offers a magisterial new account of this critical period in Spanish history. He exposes the ways in which the Republic brought into the open simmering tensions between Catholics and hardline anticlericalists, bosses and workers, Church and State, order and revolution. In 1936 these conflicts tipped over into the sacas, paseos and mass killings which are still passionately debated today. The book also explores the decisive role of the international instability of the 1930s in the duration and outcome of the conflict. Franco's victory was in the end a victory for Hitler and Mussolini and for dictatorship over democracy.
This comprehensive study of international ethnic cleansing provides in-depth coverage of its occurrences in Armenia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, as well as cases of lesser violence in early modern Europe and in contemporary India and Indonesia. After presenting a general theory of why serious conflict emerges and how it escalates into mass murder, Michael Mann offers suggestions on how to avoid such escalation in the future. Michael Mann is the author of Fascists (Cambridge, 2004) and The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge 1986).
Madrid became one of the key symbols of Republican resistance to General Franco during the Spanish Civil War following the Nationalists' failure to take the city in the winter of 1936-7. Yet despite the defiant cries of 'No pasar'n', they did eventually pass on 28 March 1939. This book examines the consequences in Madrid of Franco's unconditional victory in the Spanish Civil War. Using recently available archival material, this book shows how the punishment of the vanquished was based on a cruel irony - Republicans, not the military rebels of July 1936, were held responsible for the fratricidal conflict. Military tribunals handed out sentences for the crime of 'military rebellion'; mere passivity towards the Nationalists before 1939 was not only made a civil offence under the Law of Political Responsibilities but could cause dismissal from work; and freemasons and Communists, specifically blamed for the Civil War, were criminalized by decree in March 1940. However, contrary to much that has been written on the subject, the post-war Francoist repression was not exterminatory. Genocide did not take place in post-war Madrid. While a minimum of 3,113 judicial executions took place between 1939 and 1944, death sentences were largely based on accusations of participation in 'blood crimes' that occurred in Madrid in 1936. Moreover, and unlike most other accounts of the Francoist political violence, this book is concerned with the question of when and why mass repression came to an end. It shows that the sheer numbers of cases opened against Republican 'rebels', and the use of complex pre-war bureaucratic procedures to process them, produced a crisis that was only resolved by decisions taken by the Franco regime in 1940-1 to abandon much of the repressive system. By 1944, mass repression had come to an end.
Massimo Cacciari is one of the leading public intellectuals in today's Italy, both as an outstanding philosopher and political thinker and as now three times (and currently) the mayor of Venice. This collection of essays on political topics provides the best introduction in English to his thought to date. The political focus does not, however, prevent these essays from being an introduction to the full range of Cacciari's thought.The present collection includes chapters on Hofmannstahl, Luk\~cs, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Weber, Derrida, Schmitt, Canetti, and Aeschylus. Written between 1978 and 2006, these essays engagingly address the most hidden tradition in European political thought: the Unpolitical. Far from being a refusal of politics, the Unpolitical represents a merciless critique of political reason and a way out of the now impracticable consolations of utopia and harmonious community. Drawing freely from philosophy and literature, The Unpolitical represents a powerful contribution to contemporary political theory.A lucid and engaging Introdcution by Alessandro Carrera sets these essays in the context of Cacciari's work generally and in the broadest context of its historical and geographical backdrop.
Since the eighteenth century the development of European nationalisms has been directly linked to war. Military conflicts create socio-psychological borders among ethnic and national groups, and delineate sharp contrasts between ‘us’ and ‘them’ by stereotyping the other. Therefore, war provides at least two mutually reinforcing effects for nationalism. First, the wartime social environment and the cult of the nation in arms create internal cohesion, minimise dissent and reinforce a deeper sentiment of community based on strong emotional ties such as blood and sacrifice, common suffering and shared destiny. Second, military action conclusively formulates a stereotyped image of the other, which is just as necessary for consolidating the national identity as the previous task of nation-building carried out by institutions, intellectual elites or social movements. Patriotic wars have strongly contributed to the consolidation of the variegated nation-building processes that were under way in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. The Spanish civil war was no exception to this European trend. It is paradoxical that this civil conflict was perceived as a patriotic war by most of the political elites on either side. Both sides excluded the other from being considered as true Spaniards and this exclusion persisted to some extent throughout the following forty years. The process of conveniently ‘forgetting’ the Spanish civil war during the transition to democracy, after Franco's death, in order to avoid reviving the armed conflict and reawakening the ‘ghost’ of the permanently irreconcilable two Spains was the result of a political consensus among Francoist reformers and democrats. © Cambridge University Press 2005 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
This book deals with one of most controversial issues of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939): the “Red Terror.” Approximately 50,000 Spaniards were extrajudically executed in Republican Spain following the failure of the military rebellion in July 1936. This mass killing of “fascists” seriously undermined attempts by the legally constituted Republican government to present itself in foreign quarters as fighting a war for democracy. This study, based on a wealth of scholarship and archival sources, challenges the common view that executions were the work of criminal or anarchist “uncontrollables.” Its focus is on Madrid which witnessed at least 8,000 executions in 1936. It shows that the terror was organized and was carried out with the complicity of the police, and argues that terror was seen as integral to the antifascist war effort. Indeed, the elimination of the internal enemy - the “Fifth Column” - was regarded as important as the war on the front line.
This groundbreaking history of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) examines, for the first time in any language, how General Francisco Franco and his Nationalist forces managed state finance and economic production, and mobilized support from elites and middle-class Spaniards, to achieve their eventual victory over Spanish Republicans and the revolutionary left. The Spanish Nationalists are exceptional among counter-revolutionary movements of the twentieth century, Michael Seidman demonstrates, because they avoided the inflation and shortages of food and military supplies that stymied not only their Republican adversaries but also their counter-revolutionary counterparts-the Russian Whites and Chinese Nationalists. He documents how Franco's highly repressive and tightly controlled regime produced food for troops and civilians; regular pay for soldiers, farmers, and factory workers; and protection of property rights for both large and small landowners. These factors, combined with the Nationalists' pro-Catholic and anti-Jewish propaganda, reinforced solidarity in the Nationalist zone. Seidman concludes that, unlike the victorious Spanish Nationalists, the Russian and Chinese bourgeoisie were weakened by the economic and social upheaval of the two world wars and succumbed in each case to the surging revolutionary left. © 2011 by The University of Wisconsin Press All rights reserved.
On June 22, 1941, Germany launched the greatest land assault in history on the Soviet Union, an attack that Adolf Hitler deemed crucial to ensure German economic and political survival. As the key theater of the war for the Germans, the eastern front consumed enormous levels of resources and accounted for 75 percent of all German casualties. Despite the significance of this campaign to Germany and to the war as a whole, few English-language publications of the last thirty-five years have addressed these pivotal events. In Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East, Stephen G. Fritz bridges the gap in scholarship by incorporating historical research from the last several decades into an accessible, comprehensive, and coherent narrative. His analysis of the Russo-German War from a German perspective covers all aspects of the eastern front, demonstrating the interrelation of military events, economic policy, resource exploitation, and racial policy that first motivated the invasion. This in-depth account challenges accepted notions about World War II and promotes greater understanding of a topic that has been neglected by historians. Copyright © 2011 by The University Press of Kentucky. All rights reserved.
In this book, now published in 10 languages, a preeminent intellectual historian examines the profound changes in ideas about the nature of history and historiography. Georg G. Iggers traces the basic assumptions upon which historical research and writing have been based, and describes how the newly emerging social sciences transformed historiography following World War II. The discipline's greatest challenge may have come in the last two decades, when postmodern ideas forced a reevaluation of the relationship of historians to their subject and questioned the very possibility of objective history. Iggers sees the contemporary discipline as a hybrid, moving away from a classical, macrohistorical approach toward microhistory, cultural history, and the history of everyday life. The new epilogue, by the author, examines the movement away from postmodernism towards new social science approaches that give greater attention to cultural factors and to the problems of globalization.
This book critically evaluates liberalism, the dominant attempt in the tradition of political philosophy to provide a philosophical foundation for democracy, and argues for a conception of deliberative democracy to meet this need. © 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, a Division of T&F Informa. All rights reserved.
The author explores responses to political violence through the materiality of three aspects of the Civil War in Spain: military lines in the battle forMadrid, a concentration camp in Extremadura and a remote settlement of forced labourers and their families. He shows how archaeology's revelations reflect, qualify and enrich the story of human survival under the pall cast by a dictatorship. Sharing the inquiry with the public of today also revealed some of the disquieting mechanisms by which history is composed and how archaeology can be used to deconstruct it.
Does it matter whether a civil war is fought as a conventional, irregular, or sym- metric nonconventional conflict? Put differently, do ‘‘technologies of rebellion’’ impact a war’s severity, duration, or outcome? Our answer is positive. We find that irregular conflicts last significantly longer than all other types of conflict, while conventional ones tend to be more severe in terms of battlefield lethality. Irregular conflicts generate greater civilian victimization and tend to be won by incumbents, while conventional ones are more likely to end in rebel victories. Substantively, these findings help us make sense of how civil wars are changing: they are becoming shorter, deadlier on the battlefield, and more challenging for existing govern- ments—but also more likely to end with some kind of settlement between gov- ernments and armed opposition. Theoretically, our findings support the idea of taking into account technologies of rebellion (capturing characteristics of conflicts that tend to be visible mostly at the micro level) when studying macro-level pat- terns of conflicts such as the severity, duration, and outcomes of civil wars; they also point to the specific contribution of irregular war to both state building and social change.
Although part of a wider cultural and political phenomenon in world democracies, the revival movement on memory from traumatic past events has in the case of Spain strong contextual bearings. Drawing on the concept of ‘regimes of memory’, this article discusses two successive patterns of supply and demand of discourse and policies on memory from the end of the 1936–1939 Civil War to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Describing the rhetoric of ‘total victory’ under Franco's dictatorship, and later of ‘collective and shared guilt’ under democracy, it outlines a dialectics between hegemonic and non-hegemonic discourses on collective trauma that helps explain the rise and decline of regimes of memory in general, as well as the current orientation of public debates in Spain towards a new regime of memory based on a claim for ‘instituted remembrance’ of the traumatic past.
Does it matter whether a civil war is fought as a conventional, irregular, or symmetric non-conventional conflict? Put differently, do “technologies of rebellion” impact on a war’s severity, duration, or outcome? We find that irregular conflicts last longer than all other types of conflict, while conventional ones tend to be more severe in terms of battlefield lethality. Irregular conflicts tend to be won by incumbents, while symmetric non-conventional and conventional ones are more likely to end in draws. Substantively, these findings help us make sense of the evolution of civil wars, which are likely to become shorter, more intensely fought, and more challenging for existing governments. Theoretically, our findings support factoring in the technology of rebellion when studying the severity, duration, and outcome of civil wars; they also contribute a better understanding of the historical contribution of irregular war to both state building and social change.
One of the most noticeable topics within recent Spanish historiography is the analysis of processes of mass violence. Salient among these were the Franco concentration camps, a violent re-educational system made up of more than 180 camps, 104 of which were permanent. The camps operated from 1936 until 1947, under the control of Franco's army, with its corresponding regime of forced labour and exploitation of prisoners of war. Half a million Spaniards and Europeans experienced first hand the Spanish version of the fascist concentration-camp system. This article offers an analysis of the inside history of Franco's concentration camps and then locates them comparatively within a theoretical and empirical Fascist model of internment, exploitation and violence.
The study of ethnicity is dominated by constructivist approaches, yet empirical studies of civil war have been oblivious to their insights. In this article, the author examines the relationship between ethnic identity and civil war and points to several empirical instances of fluidity in the behavioral expression of ethnic identities within civil war. The author identifies two processes that are consistent with constructivist theorizing: identity shift and ethnic defection. The author provides several empirical illustrations along with a micro-level test of the determinants of ethnic defection. At the micro level, ethnic defection is best predicted by the extent of territorial control exercised by the incumbent political actor and the level of prior insurgent violence. The author also hypothesizes that at the macro level, ethnic defection is a function of the resources available to incumbent actors and conclude by stressing the need to take seriously the endogenous dynamics of civil wars.
With the rise of feminist and cultural protests, political liberalism has been criticized for promoting a version of public neutrality that does not take diversity seriously and marginalizes sexual, religious and cultural minorities. Thus, the "politics of difference" has been seen as a legitimate democratic alternative to a kind of liberalism hostile to diversity. Stephen Macedo aims to show that political liberalism respects a broad range of conceptions of the good and of ways of life, but cannot accommodate minorities who reject pluralism itself in order to maintain their group identity and whose claims and practises impede civic education and undermine toleration.
Ideology, and its study, have been subject to an interpretational tug-of-war among political theorists that, until recently, has devalued their status as an object of scholarship. Disputes have raged over the scientific standing of ideology, its epistemological status, and its totalitarian and liberal manifestations. Many political philosophers have eschewed its group orientation, and the more recent interest of students of ideology in ordinary political language and in the unconscious and the indeterminate. Following an historical survey of changing fashions and more durable features in the analysis of ideology, it is argued that ideology should be explored as the most typical form of political thinking, and that its study conducts political theorists to the heart of the political. Ideology is now seen as ubiquitous, while the methodologies through which ideologies are studied take on board conceptual malleability and ideational pluralism, and offer bridges between identifying ‘social facts’ and their inevitable interpretation.
In the face of widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary democratic practice, there has been a growing interest in theories of deliberative democracy. However theorists have often failed to sufficiently address the question of institutional design. This paper argues that recent experiments with citizens' juries should be of interest to deliberative democrats. The practice of citizens' juries is considered in light of three deliberative democratic criteria: inclusivity, deliberation and citizenship. It is argued that citizens' juries offer important insights into how democratic deliberation could be institutionalized in contemporary political decision-making processes.
Pragmatism and Deliberative Politics
- Liberalism After