Democracy and its futures – between governance and counter-publics

《DemoFutures》将以批判的视角，综合社会学理论和政治哲学的观点，分析民主主义的中长期趋势和可能的未来。它将侧重于两者之间的对比，一方面是统治大多数“官方”民主政治的治理工具逻辑，另一方面是公众批评和抗议的表达和主观逻辑。公民经历了民主实践和制度的“侵蚀危机”。其背后的因素之一是日益强大的治理逻辑，这种逻辑从地方一级延伸到全球一级，它叠加在民主的决策形式之上，并经常取代民主的决策形式。它会导致一种不真实的感觉和一种“缺乏选择”的体验。然而，我们也可以观察到公众的动员、批评和抗议，这些活动往往围绕着具体问题，例如地方基础设施项目。它们引导批判性公众在主流公共空间的常规轨道之外发展。在这些空间内进行的审议提供了转变为反公众的潜力，在其中可以想象替代的未来。然而，值得注意的是，法国和德国的这些抗议和运动的动态呈现出相当不同的动态，这一事实需要进一步分析。为了理解民主的可能未来，需要理解这些运动的两个维度：它们的主观逻辑和它们感知到的表达意义——这是由批判社会学探索的——以及审议的实践和制度——这是由审议民主理论探索的。因此，DemoFutures的目标是将来自这两个学科的法国和德国研究人员聚集在一起。来自巴黎笛卡尔大学-巴黎索邦大学<e:1>和<s:1>政治与技术学院Universität m<e:1>的初级和高级研究人员将在一系列平行和相互交织的研究领域进行合作，并组织一系列活动，以创建一个致力于民主未来的法德学者网络。该项目将开发一个跨学科的帐户，其中这两个观点交织在一起，它将以比较的角度分析来自法国和德国的“示范案例”。将特别关注数字公共空间的背景条件，以及专家与抗议代理人之间的关系。因此，法德两国将在方法和途径方面以及在分析对象方面产生协同作用。

DemoFutures will analyze current trends and possible futures of democracy in the mid- and long-term, bringing together perspectives from sociological theory and political philosophy in a critical perspective. It will focus on the contrast between, on the one hand, the instrumental logic of governance that dominates most “official” democratic politics, and, on the other, the expressive and subjective logic of public criticisms and protest.Citizens experience an “erosion crisis” of democratic practices and institutions. One of the factors behind it is the increasingly powerful logic of governance, which reaches from the local to the global level, and which is superimposed upon, and often replaces, democratic forms of decision-making. It leads to a sense of inauthenticity and an experienced “lack of alternatives.” Nonetheless, we can also observe public mobilization, criticism and protest, which often crystalize around specific issues, e.g. local infrastructure projects. They lead to the development of critical publics off the beaten tracks of the dominant public space. The deliberation that take places within these spaces offers the potential to turn into counter- publics, in which alternative futures can be imagined. It is worth noting, however, that the dynamics of these protests and movements in France and Germany take on rather different dynamics, a fact that requires further analysis.In order to understand possible futures of democracy, two dimensions of these movements need to be understood: their subjective logic and their perceived expressive meanings – which are explored by critical sociology – and the practices and institutions of deliberation – which are explored by theories of deliberative democracy. Hence, DemoFutures aims at bringing together a team of French and German researchers from these two disciplines. Junior and senior researchers from the Université Paris Descartes – Université Paris Sorbonne Cité and from the Hochschule für Politik an der Technischen Universität München will collaborate in a series of parallel and intertwined lines of research, and organize a number of events in order to create a French-German network of scholars who work on the future of democracy.The project will develop an interdisciplinary account in which these two perspectives are intertwined, and it will analyze “exemplary cases” from France and Germany in a comparative perspective. Attention will be paid in particular to the background conditions of the digital public space, and the relations between experts and agents of protest. Thus, French-German synergies will be brought about both on the level of methods and approaches, and on the level of the objects of analysis.