We are living in a time when social and political authoritarianism appear to be gaining ground around the world. This book presents the democratic practices, spaces and processes that engage directly with the theoretical assumptions advanced by the epistemologies of the South, summoning other contexts and empirical realities that attest to the possibility of a renewal and deepening of democracy beyond the liberal and representative canon, which is embedded within a world capitalist system.

The chapters in this book put forward the ideas of demodiversity, of high-intensity democracy, of the articulation between representative democracy and participatory democracy as well as, in certain contexts, between both these and other forms of democratic deliberation, such as the communitarian democracy of the indigenous and peasant communities of Africa, Latin America and Asia.

The challenge undertaken in this book is to demand utopia, imagining a post-abyssal democracy that permits the democratizing, decolonizing, decommodifying and depatriarchalizing of social relations. This post-abyssal democracy obliges us to satisfy the maximum definition of democracy and not the minimum, transforming society into fields of democratization that permeate the structural spaces of contemporary societies.

About the Author

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Director Emeritus of the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA). He has written extensively on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology and social movements. His most recent publications are (with Maria Paula Meneses) Knowledges Born in the Struggle: Constructing the Epistemologies of the Global South (2019) and The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (2018).

Jose Manuel Mendes is an Associate Professor with Aggregation at the University of Coimbra (Portugal). He is also researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, where he works in the fields of risk and social vulnerability, planning, public policies and citizenship. His most recent work in English is (with F. Freitas) "Disaster, Reconstruction, and Data for Social Good: The Case of Wildfires in Portugal," International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment (2019).

Book Information
ISBN 9780367512316
Author Boaventura Santos
Format Paperback
Page Count 246
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 353g