In this paper I will hold that it is desirable to ensure people be included within the borders and the political community both, but I will point out the potential incompatibility of the two. In an open-borders society, members of a polity would not be exclusively individuals who expect to stay in a country for a long time but also people who temporarily work and live there. Among this latter group would be individuals who would continuously migrate—call them hypermigrants. While (...) I agree that hypermigrants cannot be fully included in the decision making, excluding them is problematic because it justifies a hierarchical society. The case of hypermigrants points to the tension between treating people as equals by including them in a democratic system whose members do not simply support their own interests but strive for the common good and by including them in an open-borders society that acknowledges their life plans as of equal worth. To overcome these problems I will claim that it is possible to justify an account of a fluid demos that provides different levels of political inclusion and addresses the challenges of a hypermigration polity. In this account, citizenship and full political inclusion are granted to permanent members only but hypermigrants are partially included. This perspective recognises every member of the polity as equal and ensures that she has control over the relevant political decisions without undermining the idea that citizenship requires a sense of belonging to the political community and concern for its long-term interests. (shrink)

In group discussions of any kind there tends to be an up and down in the level of deliberation. To capture this dynamic we coined the concept of Deliberative Transformative Moments (DTM). In deeply divided societies deliberation is particularly important in order to arrive at peace and stability, but deliberation is also very difficult to be attained. Therefore, we wanted to learn about the conditions that in group discussions across the deep divisions of such societies help deliberation. We organized such (...) group discussions between ex-guerrillas and ex-paramilitaries in Colombia, Serbs and Bosnjaks in Srebrenica, and poor residents and local police officers in the favelas (slums) of Brazil. We could identify factors that help to transform discussions from low to high deliberation and risk transformations in the opposite direction. We could also identify factors that help to keep a discussion at a high level of deliberation, and, in a next step, we could determine to what extent long sequences of deliberation had a positive impact on the outcomes of the discussions. Finally, we show how our research results can have a long term effect if it is used in schools of such deeply divided societies. (shrink)

This essay is part of a dossier on Cristina Lafont's book Democracy without Shortcuts.