Democratizing Democracy

The majorconflicts between the Global North and the South can be expected toresult from the confrontation of alternative conceptions of democracymainly between liberal or representative democracy and participatorydemocracy. The hegemonic model of democracy while prevailing on aglobal scale guarantees no more than low-intensity democracy. Inrecent times participatory democracy has exhibited a new dynamicengaging mainly subaltern communities and social groups that fightagainst social exclusion and the suppression of citizenship.In thiscollection of reports from the Global South—India South AfricaMozambique Colombia and Brazil—De Sousa Santos and his colleaguesshow how in some cases the deepening of democracy results from thedevelopment of dual forms of participatory and representativedemocracy and points to the emergence of transnational networks ofparticipatory democracy initiatives. Such networks pave one of the waysto the reinvention of social emancipation.This is volume 1 of the <i>Reinventing Social Emancipation</i> project edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos.