Decolonizing Democracy: Power in a Solid State (Global Critical Caribbean Thought) - Hardcover

Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783487054 ISBN 13: 9781783487059

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016

Synopsis

Democracy is the apparent motor of globalization, binding together ideas and institutions such as citizenship, human rights, race, the free market, multiculturalism, development, politics and the economy. This book looks to overturn this dogma and demonstrate that ‘liberal’ democracy in fact encrypts and naturalizes the horrors of capitalism and of coloniality, while denying true or radical democracy, principally through constitutions and constitutional theory.

Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo turns to the colonized, the marginalized, the creolized, and creates two novel concepts of politics, the “hidden people” and the “decryption of power” to reach a politics through and of radical democracy. The book shows that democracy is the only space of proper politics and the essential opposition of colonization and power as potestas. Sanín-Restrepo connects post-structuralism, subaltern studies, critical legal studies, de-colonial studies and Caribbean thought to muster the necessary theoretical tools to propose new grounds to decrypt the semblance of democracy that is liberalism and thus to demonstrate that democracy, far from being the standardized rule of the majority, a simple process or an institution, is the true being in the world and of the world.

About this title

About the Author:

Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo is a member of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and a professor of legal and political theory at several institutions across Latin America, including Universidad Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM), Universidad Central de Quito, Universidad San Luis de Potosí (Mexico), PUC Rio de Janeiro, and Universidad Javeriana in Colombia, among others.

Review:

Sanín-Restrepo argues that the key to a better, non-culturalist notion of difference lies not in the types of atoms that make up language/society, but in their arrangement. A more hopeful and conscious politics requires integration into a whole in which feedback creates differentiation, with all parts affecting one another. Domination seeks to turn our linguistic-performative political powers into a simple feed-forward mechanism. The latter gives us simulated democracy. In this fascinating book Sanín-Restrepo invites us to rise against it, like Neo and Trinity do in The Matrix.Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Reader in Law & Political Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London

About this edition

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1783487054
• ISBN 13: 9781783487059
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 250