The beating heart of democratic politics is a set of paradoxes revolving around the issues of popular identity and sovereignty. Populist ideology appeals to the sovereign people, consequently engaging the democratic paradox in a manner akin to either moving an immoveable object or catching something in constant flux. Marginal consideration has been given by scholars to populism’s relationship with the democratic paradox, with current notions of the former seeing it more as a result of the latter. Thus, by recasting the (...) democratic paradox as a question and analysing its relationship with populist ideology, this article seeks to clarify the supposedly ambiguous relationship between populism and democracy. In analysing the transformative processes within populism by using early Peronism and Italian Fascism as case studies, it argues that as the ideological embodiment of the democratic paradox populist ideology preserves and expresses the paradox in the public sphere. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy’s roots in critical theory are often invoked in relation to deliberative norms; yet critical theory also stands for an ambition to provoke tangible change in the real world of political practice. From this perspective, this paper reconsiders what deliberative democracy ought to look like as a critical theory, which has not just theoretical and practical, but also methodological implications. Against conceptions of activism as pushing through one’s pregiven convictions, recent debates in critical theory highlight the necessity for critical (...) activism to be emancipatory in way that is enabling rather than imposing, and inclusive rather than ‘enlightened’. As such deliberative democracy must be at once a critical theory of democracy and a democratic critical theory: committing itself to being an innately inclusive, itself reflexive and self-reflexive project rather than a substantive theory to be implemented. (shrink)

This article deals critically with the process of coming to terms with ‘genocide’. It starts from the observation that conventional philosophical and legal approaches to capturing the essence of ‘genocide’ through an improved definition necessarily fail to adapt to the ever-changing nature of political violence. Faced with this challenge, the article suggests that the contemporary debate on genocide (and its denial) should be complemented with a focus on transforming the perceptive and interpretive frameworks through which acts of violence are discussed (...) in the public sphere. The main purpose of this article is to contribute, from the vantage point of political theory, to this debate by offering a novel normative perspective on negative reactions to genocide. Hence I argue that it is productive to speak of ‘genocide blindness’ in cases when the members of the public sphere are simply incapable of seeing an instance of violence as genocidal. To establish this claim, the article introduces Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on ‘aspect-seeing’ so as to underline the importance of changing the way that political violence is perceived and interpreted. In a second step, the article turns to María Pía Lara’s theory of storytelling as a concrete mechanism for triggering and instituting this kind of change. (shrink)