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
The Science of Democracy 2.0 is a bold attempt to reimagine how democracy is studied. Its ethno-quantic domain, spanning time, space, languages, cultures, and even non-human sources, is ambitious and explicitly pluralising. It pushes against liberal, electoral, and Western-centric frames of democracy by opening space for alternative practices and concepts.
The democratic production process itself involves multiple voices and community revisions. Indeed, it reflects some of the values this second phase in the Sciences discussion promotes. For instance, the inclusion of practices from beyond conventional political theory, the conceptual birth of the 'Fourth Theorist', and the refusal to settle on one authoritative definition of democracy are important innovations that deserve recognition.
But what are this discussion’s limits, and where can we take the project from here?
While gesturing toward the Global South, the majority of contributors are based in Western or Northern institutions. The series' reference points lean heavily on Europe, North America, and a few East Asian contexts. African, Latin American, and Indigenous epistemologies remain underrepresented, not because they lack richness, but because the infrastructures of research, translation, and academic publishing privilege Global North access. Even when we include practices from other parts of the world, we tend to filter them through Western value-frames, such as voice, representation, inclusion, participation, and freedom, rather than treating them on their own terms.
This uneven representation risks reproducing a colonial logic in which we collect and catalogue plurality but still judge it by inherited criteria. Nevertheless, the inclusion of hitherto marginalised perspectives, and the epistemological openness of the collection, marks a serious confrontation with existing power structures. It suggests that more democratic futures could indeed be possible.
Even when democratic theorists include practices from other parts of the world, we tend to filter them through Western value-frames, such as voice, participation, and freedom
At the heart of the Science of Democracy 2.0 lies a tension between its aspiration to decoloniality and the limits of its reach. By avoiding a fixed definition of democracy, the project creates a space where many forms of 'democraticity' can coexist. However, this openness comes at the cost of leaving colonial values – individualism, liberal rationality, secularism – largely unexamined.
A decolonial approach requires not just multiplicity but a radical critique of the categories and tools through which we gather, sort, and validate knowledge. Colonial knowledge infrastructures and ongoing processes of scholasticide and epistemicide continue to shape what counts as evidence. They influence which languages are deemed legible, and which practices are taken seriously.
Without confronting these meta-questions, the work ahead of us risks reinforcing the very hierarchies it seeks to displace.
Power asymmetries also persist in whose knowledge counts. While Jean-Paul Gagnon draws attention to missing practices, he tends to treat them as things to be collected rather than as epistemic partners with equal footing in (re)defining the field. The breadth of the ethno-quantic domain is impressive, but it often stops short of the deeper engagement with colonial histories of violence, extraction, and dispossession that shape democratic forms and content.
In this sense, we still treat democracy primarily as a set of practices to be documented, rather than a terrain shaped by the legacies of empire and global economic systems based on extracted labour, resources, and capital. The aspiration to a global 'science' of democracy risks universalising plurality in ways that flatten difference and obscure power (even potentially reproducing it). This echoes decolonial critiques that warn against universalism imposed from dominant centres.
We still treat democracy primarily as a set of practices to be documented, rather than a terrain shaped by the legacies of empire and global economic systems based on extracted labour, resources, and capital
In many ways, this project is the beginning of a new movement. The movement challenges the field of democratic theory to be self-reflexive, meta-theoretical, and epistemologically aware of ontological differences. However, knowledge infrastructures more broadly remain colonial, privileging English-language, European archives, and well-funded institutions or consortia eligible for grants. Epistemic justice demands not just inclusion but parity and reparations: practices and traditions from Indigenous peoples and those in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Latin America must not merely supplement the canon but reshape its conceptual and productive core.
Moreover, the normative assumptions of liberal democratic theory continue to structure much of our analysis. Alternative values such as relationality, ecological justice, and spirituality are acknowledged, but marginal. Resources, land, knowledge, our geopolitics, are all still governed by racialised and gendered extractive logics. Unless we engage with the colonial political economy, this 'reimagining democracy' project risks remaining shallow reform rather than systemic transformation.
To move further in a decolonial direction, projects like this one must embrace epistemic reciprocity. In partnership, they must prioritise the Global South and Indigenous thinkers in defining categories and methods. They must co-create infrastructures for translation, oral knowledge, and alternative forms of validation beyond Northern publishing norms. And they should draw normative frameworks from situated contexts, not retrofit them into liberal vocabularies.
Crucially, scholars and practitioners of democracy must grapple with the structural legacies of empire: state and governance institutions, law, resource extraction, economic models, geopolitics, gender and racial coding, and epistemic erasure.
A decolonial understanding of democracy requires us to challenge what counts as accepted knowledge – while recognising the genocidal origins of coloniality which frame our knowledge production
The Science of Democracy 2.0, and its book, are valuable, ambitious efforts that open important space for thinking democracy otherwise. Yet if I examine democracy through a decolonial democratic lens, it appears that we are applauding multiplicity but insufficiently challenging the structures that shape what counts as democracy, knowledge, or innovation.
A decolonial understanding of democracy requires not just collecting more voices. It demands that we challenge and transform the very terms of inclusion, resourcing, and legitimacy – in short, what counts as accepted knowledge – while recognising the genocidal origins of coloniality which frame our knowledge production.
As scholars of decoloniality have argued, this means moving beyond reformist pluralism toward structural and epistemic transformation.
This essay series is a step forward, but the journey to a decolonial science of democracies still lies before us. Are we up to the task?
