Articles by Paul Emiljanowicz

December 9, 2025

🦋 Democracy beyond collection

Paul Emiljanowicz

This new phase in the Science of Democracy series – 2.0 – opens space for multiple democratic practices and concepts that defy a single definition. Yet, can plurality alone unsettle colonial knowledge structures? Paul Emiljanowicz explores the project’s decolonial aspirations. Here, he warns that epistemic justice requires transforming infrastructures of knowledge, not merely expanding the archive of democracy

🦋 (Re)thinking democracy using Participedia

Paul Emiljanowicz

Paul Emiljanowicz manages Participedia, the largest database documenting democratic innovations from around the world. To prevent reproducing coloniality, Paul writes, we must commit to expanding our knowledge about democracy and recognising the experiences and knowledges of all peoples

Paul Emiljanowicz

Managing Director of Participedia / Lecturer, Arts & Sciences Programme, McMaster University

Paul also lectures in the political science departments at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo.

He is an active member of the Tshepo Institute for the Study of Contemporary Africa and the Global Development Section of the International Studies Association, as well as a board member for Demo.Reset: Deliberation in the Global South and Democracy Without Borders.

Paul's work has been published in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Postcolonial Studies, Third World Quarterly, Interventions, Small Axe, Democratization, Routledge and Sage, as well as in popular media outlets such as Africa is a Country and The Conversation.

He is also completing a major manuscript under a University Press and is a co-founding Co-Editor in Chief of The Annual Review for the Sciences of the Democracies published by Amsterdam University Press.

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