Politics-Debates-Concepts. Politik-Debatten-Begriffe

‘Democratic crisis revisited’ illuminates and reconceptualises the multiple facets of the contemporary crises of democracy in Europe and beyond. It combines context-specific case studies from examples all over Europe, and especially from Eastern Europe, with a theoretical reconceptualisation of democracy. Democracy is conceived of as an ongoing practice of open-ended democratic procedures. Crisis in this view plays a constitutive role for democracy that can disintegrate but also recreate it. Democracy is thus a dialectical struggle between practices of politicisation and depoliticisation, i.e. it produces contingency and processes that decrease it. This understanding of the crisis as constitutive for democracy may open new avenues for democratisation rather than deal it a death blow.

With contributions by
Aleksandra Belina, Michael Briguglio, Maria Brown, Evgenii Dainov, Alexandra Iancu, Anna Krasteva, Tonči Kursar, Gonçalo Marcelo, Ana Matan, José María Rosales, Přemysl Rosůlek, Meike Schmidt-Gleim, Natalija Shikova, Ruzha Smilova, Christel Stormhøj, Renáta Uitz and Claudia Wiesner.

War and emergency powers have existed over the centuries in different countries, raising questions about the political authority related to them. ‘US Congress’ Powers under Debate’ illustrates how war and emergency powers have been understood and what kind of concepts and argumentation have been adopted to define these powers in US political debates from the 1970s to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Donald J. Trump administration. Its aim is to show the oversight Congress may have over presidential powers in exceptional situations and thus to offer a novel approach to the study of war and emergency powers.