Across three days, from 26 to 28 February, the Centre for Asian Studies in Africa (CASA), in collaboration with the Innovation Foundation for Democracy, will be hosting the international seminar Making Democracy as a Community of Life: Transregional Dialogues across Asia and Africa.

“This symposium represents a further development of our collaboration with the Innovation Foundation for Democracy,” says CASA director, Prof Alf Gunvald Nilsen. “Last year, we hosted the symposium Mapping Democratic Decline, Imagining Democratic Futures, which was focused on identifying the drivers of democratic backsliding as well as political projects that seek to defend and deepen democracy across the Asian and African continents.” The event was extremely successful, and Prof Nilsen is currently developing a major special issue of the academic journal Globalizations based on the proceedings from the symposium.

“Given the success of last year’s symposium, we are continuing our collaborative efforts, and this year, we are digging even deeper into what democratic futures might look like in Asia and Africa,” says Nilsen. The symposium’s theme draws on a text authored by the world-renowned historian and political scientist Achille Mbembe, in which he argues that if the democratic project is to have a future in a context of deep inequality and precarity, it will have to be reconstructed as a community of life.

“The original reference point for Mbembe’s essay was South Africa, a decade and a half after liberation. However, in the early 2020s, it is clear that his diagnosis is relevant across the Asia-Africa spectrum of the world-system,” Nilsen says. “Across two continents which together are home to 70% of the world’s population, zombie neoliberalism lays waste to both human and non-human life, while autocratization eviscerates the substance of democracy. The walling regimes and killing projects of nation states similarly erodes the right to life. In this context, we need to ask critical and difficult questions about what it will entail to reimagine and remake of democracy as a radical, future-oriented endeavour in Asia and Africa.”

The symposium presents a varied and exciting programme. Insisting that democracy needs to be thought of as much more than simply a technology of government or a set of formal institutions and procedures. “The moment we live in requires intellectual endeavours that are bold, unconventional, and radical,” Nilsen says. Kicking off with a keynote that will be delivered by Achille Mbembe, the symposium will feature panels which explore how the life-making practices of the urban poor and migrants can fuel a redistribution of the means of human survival and belonging, how literary and visual imaginations, as well as activist archives, can foster new democratic vocabularies, and how popular protest forge new political communities for democratic futures.

“We will also host a moderated conversation between journalists from South Africa and India about the importance of independent media as a form of witnessing against autocratization, and we wind up by screening an award-winning documentary about popular protests against anti-Muslim citizenship laws in India, and discussing it with the filmmaker, Nausheen Khan,” Nilsen adds. “I hope the symposium will be of interest to the UP community, and to the public more generally.”

RSVP:                    By 13:00 Friday, 21 February 2025; Please click here to RSVP

Enquiries:             Mr Mbuso Vuma at [email protected]