Cutting democracy's knot

Briefly, what animates our exploration of democracy are questions pertaining to border policing and migration, the complex of colonial politics operating as both a 'Westernisation' of the globe and the colonialisation of metropolitan spaces and, not least, the relation of this to the boundaries and constitutions of the political. From this perspective, and however much of a risk the reckoning is, the meaning and practice of democracy as the sovereignty of 'the people' cannot be denied. No matter the presumed tactical or pragmatic elasticities that might be afforded by any given conflict over who 'the people' are at any given moment, such conflicts always play themselves out according to a biopoliticised complex in which political decision (or, at the very least, a political calculus that produces less decision as a moment of differentiation than indifference) aligns to a more or less racialised sense of who 'the people' are. For us, this condition is as untenable a ground for politics as it is unbearable.