Reflections on Democracy: Concepts, Norms, and Problems

Democracy is frequently used as a catch-all term denoting a particular system of government, especially one which is predicated on the following attributes: popular sovereignty, the rule of law, the advocation of a number of rights, and freedoms inter alia. But what does democracy really mean? What are some of its main varieties? To answer these questions, I examine some of the more normative and prominent models of democracy to highlight similarities and differences in order to better improve our understanding of their associated concepts, norms, and problems. The focus here is to highlight some modern and contemporary views on the following competing schools of democratic thought – liberalism, republicanism, and deliberative/discourse theory. This broad survey of the theoretical land per se is particularly aimed at identifying broad central tenets of different democratic thrusts that produce different views of citizenship, law, rights, society, and nature of the political process. To counteract concept malformation in political science, we need to particularly engage with what different versions (their respective conceptualizations) of democracy tell us about their respective processes and eventual outcomes. Furthermore, we also need to engage with the big ought/should (normative thrusts) of these variants of democracy in order to better understand empirical political life, especially the tensions between theory and practice that arise in liberal- and republican-styled democracies. The time is ripe for such a conversation given the current worries that exist about the state of democracy, especially if we are in a new era of democratic backsliding.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003434290-3/reflections-democracy-jermaine-young

States of exception as paradigms of government: emergency and criminal justice in Jamaica?

Emergencies/exceptions are presumed to be disruptive events which are inherently dangerous to the normal workings of a nation-state. Declarations of emergency by governments of all types around the world to deal with a variety of crises have prompted Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben to characterize them as “the dominant paradigm of government” (2005). This paper explores the Jamaican government’s penchant for using emergency powers to curb high homicide rates. During 2017–2020, Jamaica has declared and operated several States of Emergencies (SOEs) and Zones of Special Operations (ZOSOs) to address what are usually considered ordinary criminal justice matters. In this paper, I argue that the resulting anomalies, such as arbitrary plus extended detentions and internal extraordinary renditions, have placed Jamaica in a quasi-permanent “state of exception” in which the constitutional rights of some citizens have been compromised in the name of state security. This paper contributes to the growing literature on how blurry the lines between norm and emergency/exception have become across different global jurisdictions.

• https://doi.org/10.1080/08263663.2022.2066819