Democracy and Empire

Recent sociological scholarship has begun to revisit the making of modern democracy by reevaluating previous theories and research underpinned by implicit methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism as well as by focusing on democracy's exclusions and alternatives. This has required a rethinking of our units of analysis, of democracy's temporalities and of its key actors, moving away from historically limited and inaccurate incrementalist narratives of democracy's slow expansion from wealthy white men in Atlantic metropoles to others.

In this light, democracy's marriage with nation-states appears to have more continuity with imperial legacies and to have restricted the continued deepening and reinvention of democracy, halting, for example, non-sovereign or non-national democratization. Cases and histories that run against the grain of narrow Atlantic metropolitan democracy and its nation-state successors continue to be overlooked by the sociology of democracy, for example, from the first full women's suffrage in 1905 in a periphery of the Russian Empire to the exclusions that accompanied democracy's metropolitan advances.

Present-day sociology of democracy still builds on a previous generation of research that systematically overlooked democracy's global and (inter-)imperial entanglements, structures and exclusions. Existing democracies today should also be theorized in this historical context, through their exclusions and alternativelessness, and compared with qualitatively different views on democracy. This session invites empirical case studies from anywhere in the world since the American Revolution that rethink or retheorize the sociology of democracy.