Democracy in Translation: Crisis, Legitimacy and Claim-Making in the Global South

Democracy travelled to much of the world as an export. Its institutional templates, its vocabulary of representation and consent, and the benchmarks used to measure it took shape in a particular corner of the North Atlantic and were carried outward through colonial administration, development programmes, and conditional aid. That inheritance now sits awkwardly. Several of the exporting states are drifting toward executive dominance and narrowed pluralism, while the societies that received the model continue to make democratic claims, often loudly, through channels that state-centred political science registers poorly. This panel asks what democratic crisis looks like when examined from the Global South. Rethinking democratic governance in a changing global system, as the congress theme proposes, requires asking whose democracy is in question and who holds the authority to define it. Rather than beginning with parties, parliaments, and electoral cycles, we invite papers that locate democratic practice alongside or beneath formal institutions.
One cluster of interest concerns who performs democratic work when the state is not the site. This includes non-state actors that deliver services, adjudicate disputes, or claim representation; women's movements that have become the most sustained source of democratic pressure while remaining peripheral in comparative scholarship; religious authorities advancing or contesting democratic claims; and diasporic and migrant networks that carry political contention across borders.
A second cluster concerns where democratic claims are made when open contestation is costly. Cultural production functions as political argument here: cinema, music, and visual culture carry anti-authoritarian imagination, with Iranian cinema one case among many. Digital publics under restrictive conditions raise the same question, as do everyday encounters with bureaucracy and the slow erosion or repair of trust.
A third line is conceptual. Vocabularies of legitimacy that do not originate in the liberal lexicon, such as adalet, ubuntu, or dharma, may not translate into it either. Papers asking what such vocabularies demand of the category of democracy are especially welcome.
Single-country studies, cross-regional comparison, and interpretive or quantitative work are all suitable. The aim is not a Southern annex to an existing checklist, but the questions the checklist has been hiding.