Duties in Intercultural Democratisation – Hardcover

Rights are fundamental, but cannot alone sustain democracy. Liberalism frames representation and procedure through a Eurocentric, individualist grammar while relegating duty to obligation, obedience or nationalist sacrifice. Autocratic actors can then mobilise duty to support coercive and exclusionary hierarchies. Drawing on postcolonial and intercultural scholarship and critically engaging Gandhi’s anti-colonial thought, the book reframes democratic duty through relationality, autonomous subjectivation and collective agency. It contrasts verticality with horizontality, and resistance to domination with the creation of democratic subjects, relations and processes. Decentring liberal-democracy means refusing to treat it as democracy’s universal model and confronting its entanglements with colonialism, Eurocentrism and racialised, gendered and classed structures of privilege. Amid polarisation, authoritarian populism and ecological precarity, democratic duty supports democratic resistance and intercultural democratisation from below. It advances centrifugal redistributions of power towards marginalised subjects, thereby redefining liberty and equality and supporting the demos to resist domination and continually reconstitute shared power.

This is an open access book.