Democratization : Adi M. Ophir

Democratization : Adi M. Ophir

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Democratization’ is “the action of making something more democratic in organization or character; (also) the process of becoming democratic.”¹ ‘Democratic,’ in turn, is “of or related to democracy” or “consistent with its principles,” and ‘Democracy’ is “Government by the people; esp. a system of government in which all the people of a state or polity. . .are involved in making decisions about its affairs.”² 

The logical order is clear: a noun derived from a verb, ‘democratization,’ a substantiation of an action, is explained by an attribute—‘democratic,’ which is derived from and explained by the abstract noun—‘democracy.’ First comes a regime, a system of government of a distinct kind, or at least an idea that captures it, then identifiable attributes, features, or elements that are characteristic of that regime, and finally the action of bringing it about.³ Thus, democratization owes its meaning to democracy, and the latter is placed as the end for which democratization is the means, any means that would bring it about. The mainstream academic literature on democratization, which thrived between the decline of the USSR and the end of the Cold War in the nineteen eighties, and the eruption of the global Covid pandemic at the end of the second decade of the next millennium⁴ follows this logic to the letter.⁵ Generally speaking, scholars in the social sciences seek to analyze the conditions under which democratization takes place and the causes that trigger it, reconstruct the processes that bring a polity closer to democracy, and sometimes even to measure the progress made.⁶ But they rarely ask what democratization is; tacitly or explicitly, they rather presuppose that it is the transition from oligarchy, monarchy, fascism, or another authoritarian regime to democracy. These regimes, including democracy,⁷ are often conceived as ideal types that allow certain variations and easy classification of nation states; on the more empirical side of the spectrum, a tentative concept of democracy is extracted by observing “‘really existing’ democracies.”⁸ The latter expression often implies a tacit, unproblematized acceptance of the way a group of states in the Global North call themselves and recognize their peers as democracies, and tacitly presupposes the set, “democracy,” of which these “democracies” are members.

I assume that this lexical approach to democratization is quite common—and widely misleading. The reason is not simply that “really existing democracies” often fall short of the idea of democracy and distort it by placing themselves as the idea’s contemporary manifestation, or that the ideal type proposed is always a contested one. Democratization, I argue below, is not a means but an end of an unfinished, interminable project, for which democracy—as a term, ideal type, and concept—could serve as a means, and for which it might also be an ideological obstacle. Democratization cannot be guided by an imaginary consensus regarding the meaning of and condition for democracy; rather, democracy can be relevant to democratization only in so far as it is a contested concept and the ways through which democracy is practiced and institutionalized are being problematized. To avoid an approach to democratization that privileges an ideal-type conception of democracy, I start my conceptualization with the existing condition of those who strive to democratize. Democratization is conceived here initially as a strife, embodied in everyday practices and eventful struggles that seek to grant a multitude among those ruled and governed under an existing formation of power (the so-called demos) a greater and more equal share in the power(s) that rule(s) and govern(s) them.

Prima facie, the initial definition of democratization offered here is not a radical one. It refers to activities that presuppose existing power formation which, in part or as a whole, is not accessible to those who are subject to its rule. The definition stops short of stipulating what is the extent of this sharing of power, its frequency and scope, or what access to power it offers. The abolition of this power in part or as a whole or the transferring of every aspect of it to the governed remains unimaginable. Democratization, according to this definition, is not a struggle for popular sovereignty; it can be conceived without assuming the existence of a sovereign power altogether, but also without a clear idea about who the people who claim it are. A second look, however, would reveal the radical aspect of the proposed definition in the fact that its scope is virtually limitless. In principle, any formation of power may be democratized, any assemblage of governed individuals may claim democratization, and the only a-priori limit of democratization is the very existence of ruling and governmental power.

The first ontological condition presupposed by the definition suggested here is a specific inflection of the condition of being-with-others: a form of being-with-others of a multitude in which the many share a relation of submission—however different this submission is for each individual⁹—to the same ruling powers; they are all being ruled and governed by the same cluster of power formations, which they share even when they share little else.¹⁰ The rest is contingent, and is determined by historical, political, and economic circumstances. The concept of democratization that grows from this definition should not presuppose any contingent formation or limitation of an existing ruling power or take into consideration power’s capacity to accommodate transformations. No a-priori requirements regarding the boundaries of the realm that is initially open for democratization and the forces struggling to redraw these boundaries are necessary. In other words, a concept of democratization requires no a-priori limits on what can be democratized and how; in fact, it should actively reject such limits. These limits—and they are many—come from elsewhere and in principle, for the sake of democratization, should be left there, and whenever possible questioned, if not breached in practice. And the last thing democratization requires is a consensus on what democracy is. The first thing it calls for is understanding how the multitude is being ruled and governed.

Before I proceed, a brief digression is necessary. Here and henceforth, ‘should’ is almost always used in prescriptive claims related to the conceptual performance of this text, the work of conceptualizing democratization, not to democratization itself to which this text refers. Being a response to a problem, however conceived—deprivation, discontent, dispossession, oppression, misery, injustice—, democratization consists of multiple, diverse normative and prescriptive claims. These claims are necessary for decisions regarding the targets, scope, and limits of the democratizing struggles and projects. Guided by its own norms, one of the conceptual performance’s major tasks is to describe and analyze those decisions and the prescriptions, norms, and descriptive presuppositions justifying them. Ideally, the prescriptive phrases of the conceptual work should be distinguished from the many prescriptive aspects of actual democratization. And yet one should remember that concept work is not a separate meta-language, that activists and thinkers who are involved in campaigns of democratization may spend time reflecting on, articulating and debating the concept of democratization which they seek to follow, and political theorists may join the everyday labor of democratization. And no stable boundaries between the descriptive and the prescriptive exist anyway.¹¹

Back to my concept work. More specifically, and more urgently than deliberation about democracy, democratization should not be limited by or to the modern state formation. This formation of power, a conglomeration of multiple ruling and governing apparatuses which now covers exhaustively the entire land on planet earth, is certainly the most consequential, the most urgent site for democratization, but it is by no means the framework which democratization must presuppose or be limited to. The global trajectory of democratization has long succumbed to state power, and to the image of the nation in the name of which the state claims to speak and to act, but this is due to coercion, including the power of the many (nationalists, fascists, white supremacists, racists, and their like);¹² it is not due to the limitation that theory and its concepts place on the political imagination. 

Along with the state, and increasingly working through and against it, neoliberal capitalism is the major force that limits and suppresses the political imagination necessary for the struggle to democratize. It is increasingly more difficult to imagine, let alone practice, unionization and workers’ labor as leverage in political struggles and the imposition of effective limits on capital, e.g., limits on the right to appropriate the commons and shape the way it is governed, or to pour money on political organizations and elections campaigns. It is even harder to imagine borders that are open not only to commodities but also to the people who produce them.

And yet, the state and the market are not the only domains that call for democratization. Wherever power affects the many – in the workplace and the disciplinary institutions, through control and manipulation of the media, in political parties, among social movements and organized activists, in institutions of the sciences and the arts, but also in the very movements and institutions that lead struggles for democratization – there is always excess of power not shared with the many who are ruled and governed. From this excess stem restrictions on the democratization struggle, leaving behind multitudes whose lives are being impacted while their wills and wellbeing are being ignored.

Democratization may be advanced by a whole spectrum of changes introduced into the work of power, including, rendering power more transparent, better articulated and more clearly understood; enabling public problematizations of ever more aspects of that power; letting more and diverse voices reflect on what has been problematized, discuss it and suggest alternatives; granting more people whom power affect a voice in the decision making, and a hand in implementing it. As far as the concept of democratization goes, the exact nature of the desired opening for more sharing in power in any existing formation should be left undetermined. Doors, windows, hearts, and minds, each and all may be relevant. Thus, to democratize power one needs to know how power works, the complexity of power relations in specific constellations and within specific institutions, the hidden agendas and the deals behind closed doors, and so forth. In this respect, a struggle over the transparency of power is potentially a struggle for democratization even when the next step is not taken, because the achievements of such a struggle create ever more sites for future sharing of power, starting with openings in the power formations through which the voice of the governed can be heard.

While the openings should be left indeterminate, their goal is crucial: they should be a means for more extensive and equal sharing of power. In principle, power is always shared: the master and the slave may share one yoke, or one whip, to which they are attached unequally and from opposite sides. The openings which democratization seeks to create are sites where a combination or a fusion of freedom and equality—equaliberty, as Étienne Balibar would have called it¹³—could be injected into power’s operations. Since the formations of power which a multitude of people share and to which they are subjected constantly change, more liberty and more equality, distributed more equally among more people, are both possible and necessary; hence the interminable nature of democratization, its existence as an unfinished project. This is democratization’s second ontological presupposition. And yet, the nature of the fusion between equality and liberty is never preset and the distribution of the two elements is never stable, let alone determined a-priori. Gains in liberty may come at the expense of equality and vice versa, and different proportions may be distributed differently in each new opening, with each opportunity to redraw the lines separating—and/or integrating—the governed from the authorities that govern them. As long as the two components exist in the fusion, tilting the existing balance of freedom and equality toward one side may not stop democratization but would rather affect where democratization is more urgently needed.   

To democratize, then, is to create conditions in which the many who are being ruled and governed can take a greater part in their own ruling and governance. Under these conditions, one knows enough about when and how one is being ruled to ask why one is ruled and governed in this or that way and is ruled and governed like—or unlike—others.¹⁴ Hence, to democratize also means to secure the conditions under which one can articulate this knowledge and share it with others, question it freely in public, and, if needed, collaborate with others to contest and oppose the modes of ruling and governance that have become transparent. Ideally, in non-autocratic regimes, public and collaborative struggles (which such contest and opposition require) should be protected from power’s wrath as long as power is confronted in peaceful ways (peaceful ways, but not necessarily legal, for the law itself is often at stake). But this protection is a virtue of certain regimes, not a necessary condition for the labor of democratization. 

What it takes to democratize power formations is derived to a large extent from certain aspects of these formations: how power operates, how submission and obedience are extracted, and what space for disobedience already exists within this or that formation. Other important factors include the resources available for the many who collaborate in the struggle—time, money, basic needs, motivation, talent, imagination, etc. In today’s neoliberal democracies, a set of diverse but related practices are common: canvassing, sending letters, diffusing messages on social media, advocacy, and litigation. Democratization conducted through these practices is often tedious and repetitive, requires patience and resilience, and is not easily gratifying. Under less peaceful conditions, when confrontations with power are played out in the open, the struggle for democratization may involve violence, suffering, and death. In both cases, as action taken by many who are acting together, in various forms of collaboration, whether in peaceful practices or in more militant struggles, care is not only care for the self but care for others. Camaraderie and love may often emerge, channeling anger and hate into constructive repair of a shared world. This constructive repair, however, usually remains a hopeful goal, and not an actual, lasting achievement, while both the practices and the struggles are many, and everything takes a lot of time, for which relatively few get compensated.

Success of the democratizing efforts is never guaranteed, advance is usually slow and incremental, with many setbacks and rare joyful tipping points. Even the tipping points might be short lived, a democratized constellation of power may be fragile, disappointments are common, and achievements gained over a long period of time might steadily or abruptly wear down. I refer to these practices and struggles and to the effort they involve as labor. The phenomenal field of democratization¹⁵ spans over the social spaces where this labor can be imagined as possible. This is where the phenomena, including discursive phenomena that the concept seeks to grasp, bring together, and elucidate, may appear.

I will take some liberty to use here this term, labor, while playing with Hannah Arendt’s distinctions between labor, work, and action. Democratization may be considered labor because it “never designates [a] finish product,”¹⁶  and because its “blessing or joy . . . is the human way to experience the sheer bliss of being [alive free].” “The blessing of [this] labor is that the effort and gratification follow each other as closely as producing and consuming the means of [freedom’s] subsistence . . .”¹⁷

This claim must be qualified, of course. Arendt’s chapter on labor in the Human Condition is where her thinking is most removed from the common, and from the world which the common presupposes. Labor, for her, may be imagined in solitude, devoid of any lasting collaboration among many. The farmer or the shepherd may be imagined in the solitude of their monotonous labor. The help of a servant or a younger family member may be necessary, and may generate mutual care (or even taking care together) of a plot of land, a sick animal, or the labor’s harvest, but these forms of help are not constitutive of labor as such.¹⁸

To conceive democratization as labor presupposes at least one element of a shared world, the ruling power that is responsible for the many being ruled alongside each other. The sameness of the shared power is never a simple given fact, no matter how tangible, robust, and resilient are the apparatuses that bring together and hierarchize multiple relations of power. The shared power is never experienced as such; it must be imagined. Its image, or ideas about it are supplemented to the experience of diverse phenomena through which power manifest itself: from a policeman waving his hand, to a prime minister seen speaking on a TV screen, to a tax form, a flag, or an archival document. In one way or another, one imagines and assumes that they all emanate from the same state or the same government.¹⁹

The experience of sharing the same power resembles the experience of sharing the same language, or the same life world: the contours of a shared power formation, like those of a shared language or a shared world do not have to be marked and their oneness does not have to be articulated. Differences of belonging to the shared milieu and of the ease of navigating within it may be registered and acted upon, but they are clearly differentiated from the way one encounters an alien, a speaker of another language, a stranger who is not subjected to the same power formation. When people—a few or many—collaborate in the labor of democratization, they may disagree about the nature of the power formation which they share and struggle to democratize but rarely disagree about the fact that they do share the same power formation. The (often unarticulated) sameness of the power which they share by being subordinated to it is part and parcel of their subordination.

Beyond their subjection to the same power, what the many shares varies and is contingent. But once subjection to power is experienced as shared, and certainly when one understands that the same power is responsible for both grouping of and separations among the governed, democratization must be conceived as a project of concerted labor carried by a multitude. No one can advance it singlehandedly, and it requires coordination and collaboration in a variety of tasks, distributed across the social space within and across small and large groups. While these groups may be bound more or less fluidly, be more or less institutionalized, and more or less connected, to be effective, the labor of each group must be concerted. This concerted effort involves many who are entangled-together in a struggle and preserve the temporality of labor, the tediousness and monotony of the effort, and the short life, fragility, or sheer lack of lasting end-products that characterize the Arendtian notion of labor.

The scope, intensity, and sophistication of this collaborative labor depend on what is being democratized, how many are involved in the struggle, and the extent to which the collaborative labor itself has been institutionalized, solidified into patterns of power relations and modes of action, which may be undemocratic. Democratization has often been carried out by undemocratic groups. The history of democratic revolutionary movements and transformations knows many examples of this unresolved tension between the ends of democratizing labor and its means, where claims for efficiency and expertise compete with claims for power sharing. Two models of democratization may give us two contrasting extremes of this tension—the democratization of the Tzarist state led by the authoritarian, often violent rule of the communist party under Lenin during the first phases of the Bolshevik revolution; and democratizing a collective household and communal life in a Zionist Kibbutz in Palestine, where both the power exercised and the labor seeking to democratize it were confined to a small community and the distinction between the ends and means of democratization were inherently blurred.

The seasonal, cyclical, aspect of labor is not a gift of nature and does not involve its elements. Rather, it is the result of the inherent fragility of democratic institutions, the ubiquitous presence of the will to power, and the recurring disposition of those in power to take back whatever authority is available, along with the tendency of the governed to let this happen, for the labor which democratization involves might be unrewarding and its fruits, when it yields them, are not easily consumed, let alone preserved. It takes civic education to appreciate the value of the democratic process and cherish its fruits, let alone its process, that is labor itself, when no plant comes to fruition. At the same time, it takes an already existing democratic tradition, an existing democratic habitus, to preserve new fruits harvested by renewed cycles of democratization. The circularity here is clear: labor is required not only to reform or transform institutions of power, but to make one motivated to engage in this labor in the first place, and be appreciative of its fruits, which often vanish quickly, or rotten, when those elected to office democratically abuse the power given to them. But it may also happen, as noted above, that the fruits of this labor can be cherished among the laborers regardless of their success in forcing the opening of a power structure, for the struggle itself may create temporary enclaves where sharing of power is already taking place, among the laborers, in and through their struggle.  

Some, or even a large part of the labor of democratization may be organized as work, and some may happen as action, but democratization may take place without either of those. On the one hand, the labor of democratization may originate from expressing grievances in public and discussing how to address them, and it may start with neither a clear plan of action, nor a design for an end-product in mind. On the other hand, it is also true that this labor is not supposed to come to a rest either with public display of grievances or with an approval of the institutional reform that would address them. 

Indeed, democratization may often be narrated as a process that was generated and motivated—but also interrupted and suspended—by eventful actions, and sometimes the narrative is truthful. A politicized strike, a speech in a mass demonstration, a resignation from public office followed by a call for civil disobedience, could all serve as examples here. Each of these may ignite, fuel, and maintain the democratizing process, or be ascribed with such power, but none of these, not even a series of such actions is enough for achieving, let alone securing a more democratic sharing of power. Action is an event, and its impact lies in the minds and hands of those impacted by it and depends on their response. Dramatic events, whether they are located at the tipping point of a long process, or at the heart of an unexpected rupture in existing institutions, may bring forth the demos, in whatever form the demos may take, and temporarily relieve the many from being subjected to a certain power formation. But such events do not suffice to create the demos’ authority to rule, and to guarantee the ongoing recognition of, and respect for this authority, especially not the subjection of those in position of authority, for where there is authority and the power to exercise it, “sin couches at the door.”²⁰

To succeed, the labor of democratization must inscribe new rules into the institutions of power which it targets or reconstruct them thoroughly if necessary. This implies the need to reform or reinvent the institutional culture so it can protect the new rules from becoming dead letters. Here work is needed: a plan, a design for a better institution, and the use of legislation and regulation to achieve it. Unlike the carpenter’s table, however, a solid artifact that requires easy maintenance, the artifacts of this work must be constantly cultivated to be preserved. The implementation of the reform is an open-ended process, and attentive follow up, struggles, advocacy, and activism of various kinds may be needed to deal with numerous unexpected obstacles, some of which are deliberately created by the reform’s opponents, others by new technologies used to increase governmental power to shortcut democratic processes. In other words, even when democratization is carried out as work, its products need maintenance that requires ongoing labor.

Democratic institutional rules require a democratic institutional culture, which cannot be completely dissociated from a democratic civic culture at large. This civic culture, in its turn, cannot survive if it is completely dissociated from the workplace and the household, from the schools and the police, and, above all, from the markets. The reason is clear: all these sites of human interaction take part in providing or obstructing the infrastructure for a democratic civic culture, along with much of its contents and forms of acculturation. If, by dictates of power, laws, or tradition, democratization ceases at the doors of the workplace, the school, or the corporation’s offices, a democratic civic culture shrinks accordingly. The democratic subjects, i.e., those who may rule and be ruled democratically, must be regenerated and reformed everywhere, and the task of their regeneration is left in the hands of the many who are supposed to already be democratic subjects themselves, but they themselves may still (or once again) need democratic regeneration. At the same time, the ongoing labor invested in projects of democratization may yield new possibilities or appetites for new confrontations, as well as the rewards of acting together, the joy of being-with-and-among equals.

Clearly, democratization is an unfinished and unfinishable project. There is no end to democratization; its indefinite nature requires one to welcome even the narrowest opening of a power formation for the many who are being ruled and governed within it. This is ever more important when a democratic civic culture is structurally and institutionally prevented from reaching out to, or even infiltrating the markets, disciplinary institutions, the production of knowledge and the workplace. When all these spaces of human interactions are unabashedly non-democratic and often lie beyond the reach of democratization struggles, as is the case in much of the world’s “democracies,” democratic civic culture must itself be cultivated anew with every campaign for democratization. In this condition, which is ours, every opening is a crack to be widened, each widened crack is a site for civic interaction that may shelter further labor of democratization. Each unionized Starbuck store, any student or teacher union, any local independent newspaper, even a single condominium meeting, may count and should count. May count for its effect in the long run and should count now for its potentiality.²¹

The activists’ good spirit and hope might be misleading, however. Let us look again at the task. Democratization may apply to whatever is subjected to and affected by any given formation of power. We may distinguish schematically between individuals, spheres and spaces of (inter)actions, and mode of rule and governance.

Individuals. Within any formation of power, and at any given moment, there are far more people who are ruled and governed than those who have a share in the ruling. The excess of those who are ruled without taking part in ruling determines one aspect of the ever-unfinished task of democratization.

Spheres and spaces of (inter)actions. Democratization, both the concept and the practice, has no a-priori reason to exclude any realm of rule and governance. But in practice, justifications for limiting the realm open for democratization have been many—the sacred, the interest or honor of the crown, state secrets and, more generally, raison d’etat, private interests and the right to acquire unlimited wealth. Some of these may be closely related and well entrenched, others may be added ad hoc to fit changing circumstances, but they all express the inherent tendency of the ruling power to keep ruling, and wherever possible to expand its rule. The effort to limit what can be imagined as democratizable and what can be legally democratized lies at the heart of the working of any government, including those that are called democratic, for democratization always complicates, if not directly undermines protocols of governmental efficiency and effectiveness, and often threatens special interests of members of the ruling elites. Expanding the realm open for democratization lies—or should lie—at the heart of the labor of democratization. When it is not, it means that contingent boundaries of unquestioned modes of exercising power that is not shared with the ruled and the governed have gone uncontested and been tacitly acknowledged, and those subjected to power have been complicit in their subordination.  

Modes of ruling and governance. Democratization tends to leave out many of these, even in spheres where it is actively pursued. Here is a benign example: parents may be able to get elected to school boards, and citizens elect their mayors, but the school board’s and the city council’s meetings may be held behind closed doors, leaving no protocol of the meeting on record. Democratization is usually bad for any administration, within any institution; it is time consuming, distracting, affects efficiency, and slows down everything. From the point of view of the labor of democratization, reasons to limit democratization need not to be always dismissed, but such limitations should be transparent and democratically negotiated.

Even under the best circumstances, there is always a huge surplus of power to be exposed, articulated, problematized, and democratized. Schematically but more accurately, this may be represented thus:

Opaque and non-articulated power > transparent and articulated power > problematized and debatable power > power shared with the governed.²²

This radical asymmetry determines the endless task of democratization in a modern state and the relatively meager impact of its best achievements. Within contemporary, neoliberal economy and neo-colonial power formations, the efforts seem truly Sisyphean. Without a tangible end, and with a small chance of success, and so much empty talk about “hope against all odds” in front of mounting counter-democratic forces, from the neo-liberal economy and its plutocratic and kleptocratic tzars to the natural forces unleased by capitalist unstoppable extractions, how different is the labor of democratization from Sisyphus’ rolling his boulder up his hill in Tartarus? Our best hope to escape Sisyphus’ fate is to remember that that mythical trickster was doomed because his one straightforward, doable task—rolling the boulder over the top of the hill—was made impossible by a God, Zeus, with whom no human could compete, while the powers that make the labor of democratization seem Sisyphean work through the obedience of multiple humans who could choose otherwise. 

Disobedience without risking immediate death may always serve as a crack where the labor of democratization can take place. This crack, or better a creek bank or a cove, always presupposes the logical and chronological primacy of the powers that be. As such, and in all its aspects as a practice, democratization is secondary to the existing power formations in which the ruled try to force an opening, so they too can take part in the ruling. This accounts for the inherent, grave belatedness of the democratizing process, which usually takes place long after a certain formation of power has been institutionalized, and its institutional culture has been well inscribed in the bodies and minds of the ruled subjects. Belatedness is also, and most clearly at play, when the ruled try to respond to a process of de-democratizing existing power formations. American universities, and our own experience in confronting its neo-liberal corporatization may serve as a clear example. Our helplessness in confronting them, which was made possible by this corporatization, prepared the ground for the swift advance of Trump’s revolutionary authoritarianism.

Because of its reactive nature and its belatedness relative to the power that be, the concrete nature—structures, their stability, and flexibility—of the power formation to which democratization responds is far more important for the labor of democratization than the idea of democracy by which it may be driven. One may capture this idea with the help of a well explicated concept, an ideal type, and a set of lesser variations, which may be operationalized or substituted with some trodden clichés; but none of these should be considered as the telos of democratization, even when they are guiding some of its labor. When known, thought, and reflected upon they may serve as means to advance democratization, and they may serve as such means even—or especially—when they appear as its goal. This is the case because the distance from the goal which the ideal introduces into the practice of democratization is indefinite, while the practice, being a non-linear process extending and shifting over time, constantly changes how the goal is being articulated and conceived, and how the distance from it is measured. Even when a democratic transformation is perfectly executed, the time that passes between conceiving a transformative plan and implementing it is enough to reintroduce a gap between the ideal and the real and guarantees its perpetual motion, letting the democratizing process become an end-in- and for-itself.

As such, therefore, democratization is at one and the same time a set of practices and their raison d’etre: not being ruled without being able to take some part in the ruling. It is not a means to achieve democracy, maintain or improve it, but rather the end for which democracy may serve as one of the means. The verb precedes the substantive. The concept of democracy, or democracy as an ideal type, may—but does not have to—serve the logic of these practices, being one of several discursive means that democratization can employ without limiting its unrelentless labor. The value of this means varies; it depends on the concept’s effect on laborers’ political imagination and their horizon of the possible. Where and when democratizing practices cease and their boundaries are set, democracy, the substantive, becomes a dead letter. When democracy is invoked, it does not guide democratization but rather binds it, serving to foreclose it, indeed it signals the end of democratization, its literal termination, a sheer lifeless ideal which, precisely in being invoked, reaffirms submission to a power that can no longer be shared.

With or without democracy, the struggle for and labor of sharing the power by which the many are ruled and governed is both the means and the end of democratization. This labor and struggle are fused together, in constantly changing balance, shaping the mode of being-together of free people who have become aware that they and others for whom they care are ruled against their best judgement and without their consent, most often at their expense, and for many of them, at their grave risk. But the many are not one, and there is no guarantee that the fruits of their labor and struggle would be distributed equally, that those who are more involved, spending more of their time would reap more benefits from the democratization process. When such a guarantee is inscribed into the democratic process, its boundaries are set in advance, and this time not by the ruling power which the laborers target but by power relations formed within and through the struggle for democratization itself. The greater the stakes of democratization are, the greater is the chance, and often the reasonableness that a relatively stable pattern of power relations would be formed and resist democratization in the name of a more efficient, less costly struggle for democratizing the power formation initially targeted.

This logic manifests not only the boundless nature of democratization but also its reactive nature and its asymmetrical relation with the power formations which it targets. But while the asymmetry of the struggle for democratization is ontologically given, neither the radical proportion of that asymmetry today, nor the grave deficiency in democratization are. This unproportional asymmetry is not a natural outcome of the exponential growth in the realms of life that have been colonized by the modern state and by the neo-liberal economy which the state serves today. This asymmetry has rather been historically constructed through political and economic struggles that resulted in ever new defeats of the many by the few, who, since the late nineteen seventies, have never stopped accumulating economic and political power while consistently undoing democratization and undermining the conditions of its possibility. Neo-liberalism may be reconstructed as an evolving assemblage of long-lasting projects of de-democratization.²³ 

Today, after half a century in which the ‘neo-liberal’ has replaced the ‘liberal’ as the qualifier of democracy, we are witnessing the dwindling down of the energy and scope of the labor of democratization. We are living at the dusk of “democracy” as we have known it; the US has already entered the part of the world where risks of unemployment, imprisonment, or death accompany the labor of democratization, delegalize much of its practices, turning activists into “militants,” labor into violent struggle, and struggle into “terror,” which must be crushed and turned to dust.

It seems irresponsible to speak about hope today, other than as a placebo discursive pill. Against despair one should offer the labor of democratization, which, for those who have not engaged in it yet, may start here and now: with and among free and equal comrades, committed to that kind of labor where one can find, in Arendt’s words quoted above, “the human way to experience the sheer bliss of being [free], and the gratification of producing and consuming the means of [freedom]’s subsistence.”²⁴ 

Published on September 30, 2026

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Adi M. Ophir is Professor Emeritus at The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University

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^{1. Oxford English Dictionary, “Democratization,” https://www.oed.com/search/advanced/Meanings?textTermText0=democratization&textTermOpt0=Definition (accessed August 11, 2026).↩}

^{2.  See Oxford English Dictionary, “Democratic,” https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=democratic (accessed August 11, 2026) and Oxford English Dictionary, “Democracy,” https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=democracy (accessed August 11, 2026)..↩}

^{3. The abstract noun at the beginning of the series is conceived idealistically by the OED’s authors (“all the people of a state or polity . . . are involved . . .”), and so are the order and relations implied in their definitions. It is reasonable to assume that once the meaning of democratization is derived from an ideal-type conception of democracy, ‘democratization’ would tend to keep the ideal-type nature of the latter and privilege abstract and idealized descriptions of “realizations” or “applications” of democracy’s idealized attributes over the real efforts and struggles of which the labor of democratization consists.↩}

^{4. Google Scholars counts 16,600 items on democratization in the 1980s, the decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall, 60,900 in the following decade, 169,900 in the first decade of the third millennium, and 218,000 in the second. Between 2021 and 2025, only 47.800 items are counted. If the current pace of production persists, items will reach 95,600 in the third decade—a drop of more than 50%. If the current rate of shifting attention away from democratization will persist, the drop would be deeper. See also footnote 12.↩}

^{5. “Understanding democratization necessarily entails exploring the notion of democracy itself. . . . We cannot successfully engage in the study of democratization . . . without first grappling with the substance and significance of the concept of democracy” (Jean Grugel and Matthew Louis Bishop, Democratization: A Critical Introduction [London: Bloomsbury, 2014], p. 20). Another typical example is a relatively recent “high-quality textbook,” published by Oxford University Press in 2006 (second edition in 2019). Christian Welzel, one of the editors, a regular contributor to the theoretical literature on democratization, and author of the book’s first substantive chapter (after the introduction that presents the book’s raison d’etre), begins his discussion with three short subsections: “The Nature of Democracy,” “Ancient Democracy,” and “The ‘Cool Water’ Origin of the West’s Emancipatory Dynamic.” In two pages, the reader gets acquainted with democracy’s nature and a short version of its historical trajectory (Christian Welzel, “Theories of Democratization,” in Democratization, ed. Christian W. Haerpfer, Patrick Bernhagen, Christian Welzel, and Ronald F. Inglehart [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019], pp. 22–24).↩}

^{6. For the latter, see, e.g., Gerardo L. Munck and Jay Verkuilen, “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: Evaluating Alternative Ideas,” Comparative Political Studies, 35:1 (2002): 5–34; Todd Landman, “Developing Democracy: Concepts, Measures, and Empirical Relationships,” Background paper prepared for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Sweden, May 2007, Centre for Democratic Governance, Department of Government, University of Essex. Measurement itself can be democratized: Chris Borst, “Democratizing the democratization of measurement: from the three estates of expertise to the encounter of values,” Measurement 285, 2026.↩}

^{7. “Any assessment of contemporary processes of democratization has to begin with an overview of the background conditions of modern democracies and some of their historical, regional, and cultural specificities” (Dirk Berg-Schlosser, introduction to Democratization: The State of the Art, ed. Micheal Stein and John Trent (Leverkusen: Verlag Barbara Budrich, 2007), p. 16: “A commendably earnest search for visibly viable paths to democracy has skewed recent investigations away from causes to necessary and sufficient conditions. By now we have a plethora of conditions that someone has found to be associated with the onset of democracy, and precious little idea of causal processes that generate such associations . . . This article grows out of an effort to specify the various conditions and processes that promoted or blocked democratization in different parts of Europe between 1650 and the present” (Charles Tilly, “Processes and Mechanisms of Democratization,” Sociological Theory 18:1 [2000], pp. 1–16 [1–2]).↩} 

^{8. “Since our concern is with how contemporary experience may challenge or destabilize pre-existing theory, this chapter does not attempt to provide a timeless and universal type of conceptual analysis. It is more about ‘really existing’ democracies . . . rather than about one or more idealized variants of a ‘possible’ democracy” (Laurence Whitehead, Democratization: Theory and Experience [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], p. 9).↩}

^{9. Here and henceforth, sharing would never mean equal sharing or sharing among equals. How one shares determines how one differs.↩}

^{10. The important difference between rule and govern, being ruled and being governed is relevant but cannot be addressed in this context.↩} 

^{11. All too often, descriptive and prescriptive phrases imply each other. Furthermore, in certain contexts or speech situations they play each other’s function. For example, “this is [not] a genocide,” or “there are [no] innocent people in Gaza” may, and often should, be read as prescriptions that are yet to be spelled out more explicitly; prescriptions like “Remember what Amalek did to you” addressed to Jews after October 7, 2023, were often read as describing an intention to commit a genocide, and in some regimes that call themselves democracies, the phrase “all citizens should vote” may be read as a description of an obligation rather than a right.↩}

^{12. According to Google Books’ Ngram viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Democratization&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3), the term first appeared in an English book in 1866, but before World War II its use was negligible. Its frequency grew slowly, but steadily, until a steep rise at the second half of the 1970s, with democratization in Southern Europe and Latin America. The use of the term peaked in 2018. Since the 1980s, “democratization” was often a top-down project which neo-liberal nation states and institutions from the Global North carried in the former Soviet Union and in selected countries in the Global South. The waning popularity of the term since 2018 (see note 4 above) was probably accelerated by the global pandemic, which coincided with, and perhaps contributed to, new conditions of finance and labor that drove capitalist players to distance themselves from democratic institutions.↩}

^{13. Étienne Balibar, “Equaliberty,” in Equaliberty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).↩}

^{14. I am paraphrasing here (and taking out of context) Michel Foucault’s words in “What Is Critique?,” in “What Is Critique?” and The Culture of the Self, trans. Clare O’Farrell, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini, and Arnold I. Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024, pp. 23–25).↩}

^{15. I am following here my own articulation of the phenomenal aspect of concepts that follows Foucault’s theory of discourse presented in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “As a statement (énoncé), a concept is defined according to its relation to a space of appearance of objects. Every conceptual statement marks some space [real or imaginary] in which the objects that embody the concept [and some of the components of which it is comprised] appear (or may appear)” (see “Concept” in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon (https://www.politicalconcepts.org/concept-adi-ophir/])↩}

^{16. Hanna Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 80.↩}

^{17. Ibid, pp. 106, 107–8. The crossed and supplemented words between square parentheses are mine.↩}

^{18. Even though the goal of democratization as labor may be the repair of a shared world, as an activity it should be associated with labor more than with work. Its repetitious, often cyclical nature, its ephemeral results, its often-boring, tedious nature—all these are marks of labor in Arendt’s division of human activity—are more prominent, at least in our contemporary world, than its far less common constructive nature, which would have justified classifying democratization under “work” in Arendt’s lexicon. I believe that this is true even when constructing new institutions is at stake, at least for most of the bureaucrats engaged in the effort.↩}

^{19. The same is true for other institutions: a corporate firm, a university, a military battalion, and so forth. No institution appears in its oneness; most of its members, those subjected to its authority, experience it as one because this is how they speak about it and this is how they imagine it. I presented this argument elsewhere, in Hebrew: Adi M. Ophir, Al Hashilton (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2022), pp. 57–76.↩}

^{20. Genesis 4:7. The sin here, most generally speaking, is greed for more power.↩}

^{21. This sentence should be read twice, once as uttered by the one who performs the concept of democratization, and then what the practitioner of democratization is called to consider (may count) and perform (should count). This is a clear example of the unstable boundary between theorizing democratization and practicing it.↩}

^{22. ‘>’ means “is always greater than.”↩}

^{23. In the United States, Project 2025 has served as a blueprint to accelerate and consolidate the de-democratization of America. It has been anticipated by similar projects in Hungary and replicated around the globe.↩}

^{24. Arendt, The Human Condition, 106, 107–8.↩}