TY - JOUR
T1 - Deliberation and protest: strange bedfellows? Revealing the deliberative potential of 2013 protests in Turkey and Brazil
AU - Mendonca, Ricardo
AU - ERCAN, Selen
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - Deliberation and protest have usually been understood as two mutually exclusive
ways of practicing democracy. It has been argued that protests, due to their
adversarial nature, and orientation toward conflict would hinder, rather than
enhance, the prospects for deliberation. The recent cycle of protests, including
the Arab Spring, Indignados and Occupy Wall Street, has however shown that
contentious politics do not necessarily stand in opposition to the idea of
deliberative democracy. On the contrary, these protests feature important
deliberative qualities. In this article, we seek to identify the deliberative
dimension of the recent wave of protests. We do so through a close analysis of
theoretical approaches in democratic theory and by drawing on the 2013 protests
in Brazil and Turkey. We show that deliberative democracy is not antithetical to
conflicts and agonism generated by protests. In fact, protests constitute an
integral part of public deliberation, especially when the latter is understood in
broader terms, in terms of public conversation that occurs in multiple sites of
communication. We argue that the deliberative dimension of the aforementioned
protests is manifested in: (i) how they were organized, (ii) how they were carried
out and (iii) what they have achieved.
AB - Deliberation and protest have usually been understood as two mutually exclusive
ways of practicing democracy. It has been argued that protests, due to their
adversarial nature, and orientation toward conflict would hinder, rather than
enhance, the prospects for deliberation. The recent cycle of protests, including
the Arab Spring, Indignados and Occupy Wall Street, has however shown that
contentious politics do not necessarily stand in opposition to the idea of
deliberative democracy. On the contrary, these protests feature important
deliberative qualities. In this article, we seek to identify the deliberative
dimension of the recent wave of protests. We do so through a close analysis of
theoretical approaches in democratic theory and by drawing on the 2013 protests
in Brazil and Turkey. We show that deliberative democracy is not antithetical to
conflicts and agonism generated by protests. In fact, protests constitute an
integral part of public deliberation, especially when the latter is understood in
broader terms, in terms of public conversation that occurs in multiple sites of
communication. We argue that the deliberative dimension of the aforementioned
protests is manifested in: (i) how they were organized, (ii) how they were carried
out and (iii) what they have achieved.
KW - Protest
KW - deliberative democracy
KW - Gezi Park
KW - Jornadas de Junho
KW - Turkey
KW - Brazil
U2 - 10.1080/01442872.2015.1065970
DO - 10.1080/01442872.2015.1065970
M3 - Article
VL - 36
SP - 267
EP - 282
JO - Policy Studies
JF - Policy Studies
SN - 0144-2872
IS - 3
ER -