French philosopher Claude Lefort famously argued that in a democracy political authority flows no longer from the king or the leader but from an ‘empty place’ – the will of the people, an abstraction that can never permanently, or perfectly, be filled and represented. Herein lies the greatest dynamism and a great weakness of democracy: the constant scramble to interpret and represent popular sentiments; the effort at devising inclusive and just policies also for those who disagree; the constant battle to uphold a majority in the face of political hostility from ‘the other side’, whether it appears in the form of an ideological or ethnic Other; to maintain public order in the face of perceived threats of criminal unruliness and social disintegration. To live in a democracy requires an ability to endure social and political conflict and to live with the idea that neither society, nor ‘the people’, ever unified or whole. The temptations of authoritarian rule, and “hard hand politics” in formally democratic states, lie precisely in the promise to enforce social order and to permanent fill the empty place of political authority.
The problem of violence and disorder is in other words constitutive and fundamental to democracy. Large crowds and rallies are the prized manifestation of the will of the people but it is a power that rests on the possibility of turning into public violence. By ‘public violence’ we mean forms of protest and civil unrest, or the threat thereof, that are performative and purposeful, designed to be seen and acted upon. Such violence requires inclusion and ‘taming’ by forms of political representation and inclusion in order to not turn into semi-permanent ‘disorder’ that may enable the rise of alternative sources of government and order – criminal organizations, localized strongmen, vigilantes, ethno-national movements.
In this workshop we will examine this relationship between violence, democracy, and representation through both theoretical, historical, and ethnographic materials. We will examine historic and contemporary cases of public violence and demands for order – from Chile and Latin America to India and South Africa – and we invite the participants to consider how the question of the threat of violence and democratic authority speaks to their own research.
Application form: https://forms.gle/J8K7NGBviXdaXsdq8
