By the end of Friday, we will be half-way through our ESRC seminar series 'The Public Life of Private Law'. The programme for our second seminar is here. The focus of the second seminar will be on the uses of private law in seeking reparations for 'human rights...

Celikates & Jansen: Let us start with a gen­eral ques­tion about the cur­rent state of demo­cracy. In your con­tri­bu­tion to the book Demo­cracy in What State you write: ‘Ber­lusconi and Bush, Der­rida and Balibar, Italian com­mun­ists and Hamas — we are all demo­crats now’. There seem to be two pos­sible responses to this dia­gnosis of an exal­ted dis­course of demo­cracy that seems to accom­pany, and even to be func­tion­ally inter­twined with, the mul­tiple pro­cesses of de-​democratization that you also describe in this art­icle that we wit­ness in our soci­ety: either we could give up the word demo­cracy because, being hijacked by its enemies, it no longer func­tions as a crit­ical and eman­cip­at­ory altern­at­ive, (it has become a ‘neo­lib­eral fantasy’ as Jodi Dean has argued), and to look for other con­cepts, e.g. com­mun­ism. So that’s one pos­sible reac­tion. The other reac­tion would be to fight for the word and to insist on the gap between a rad­ical under­stand­ing of demo­cracy and its lib­eral demo­cratic, low-​intensity state-​form mani­fest­a­tions, and to emphas­ize how demo­cracy is inter­twined with rup­ture, oppos­i­tion, res­ist­ance. Could you sketch your pos­i­tion in this debate?

History repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, Marx wrote in his Eighteenth Brumaire. This famous remark fits well to the current situation in Slovenia, when the country experiences the largest protests since 1989. The person standing in the centre of...

QM: A set of movements you have been involved with in Punjab is the sath, a form of people’s law. What is a sath and how does it translate? What areas are governed by sath? What is your involvement? Finally, can you explain how the experience of law and justice...