Democracy is often presented as a universal political ideal. Yet many institutions, concepts, and indicators through which it is understood emerged from Euro-American histories and were globalized through empire. These frameworks have been shaped by gendered, racialized, and heteronormative assumptions about citizenship, authority, and the boundary between public and private life.
This open panel asks what becomes visible when democracy is theorized through Global South perspectives rather than applied as an externally defined standard. It approaches the Global South not as a homogeneous geographical bloc, but as a political and epistemic location encompassing experiences of colonialism, marginality, and resistance across geographical and social settings. Decolonizing democracy need not mean abandoning democratic principles. Rather, it requires examining how their meanings and institutional expressions might be transformed by feminist and decolonial thought, Indigenous political traditions, subaltern movements, and everyday practices of participation.
The panel welcomes theoretical, empirical, and comparative contributions addressing women, gender, and sexuality in relation to democratic governance. Papers may examine Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Pacific, and Indian Ocean regions, alongside marginalized communities and Indigenous governance elsewhere. Themes may include postcolonial state formation; gendered citizenship and representation; democracy measurement; customary institutions; participation beyond the liberal state; feminist and queer movements; development and debt; political violence; international organizations; and knowledge production. Contributions attentive to inequalities within communities, and to the risk of romanticizing local traditions, are encouraged.
The panel centers four critical questions:
• Who defines and measures democracy, and which political experiences remain invisible within dominant frameworks?
• How do colonial and patriarchal legacies shape access to citizenship, representation, and authority?
• When can alternative political traditions deepen inclusion rather than reproduce gender, sexual, racial, or class hierarchies?
• How would democratic theory change if knowledge produced by women, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQI+ communities, and other marginalized groups were treated as sources of concepts rather than merely as cases to be evaluated?
Through these questions, the panel seeks a critical yet reconstructive agenda for democratic governance in an unequal world.