Articles by Paula Sabloff

October 14, 2021

🦋 Democracy preserves dignity, a means to an end, not an end itself

Paula Sabloff

Paula Sabloff, in a direct response to Jean-Paul Gagnon’s democracy challenge, argues that to understand what democracy means, we need to know what it is for. By exploring this, we arrive at a meaning that is about means, not ends. And it is not as complicated as we might think

Paula Sabloff

External Faculty Fellow, Santa Fe Institute

A political anthropologist, Paula has researched people’s changing conception of democracy in Mongolia, patron-client relations regarding higher education institutions and their state legislatures in Pennsylvania and Mongolia, how the people of Cozumel Island (Mexico) kept the national government at bay for 116 years, and the political agency of women in premodern societies.

She is the author of Does Everyone Want Democracy? Insights from Mongolia (Routledge, 2013)

Paula has also contributed to professional and popular journals, and her research contributed to the museum exhibition Modern Mongolia: Reclaiming Genghis Khan.

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