The Citizenship and Justice platform, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape; the DST-NRF/British Academy Research Professor in Political Theory, Wits and Cambridge, with the Mphil programme in Theories of Justice, University of Cape Town will co-host a conference titled Democracy: Genealogies, Concepts, and Practices from 17-18 December 2019.The conference will take place at the CHR at the University of the Western Cape.
This conference explores the relationship between the genealogy, the concept and the practice of democracy. It brings together scholars who work on the history of the idea of democracy, those who theorize its normative underpinnings as an abstract and often philosophical concept, and those who work on its concrete and ethnographic iterations. Traversing that terrain between theories of democracy and political practices especially in the global south, the conference is interested in the relationship between templates of democracy that various postcolonies inherited, the nature of popular sovereignty they afford, and the forms of authoritarianism, economic challenges, political conflict and state violence they experience.
