Contemporary debates on democratic uncertainty often begin from the crisis of existing democratic institutions. This panel asks a prior question: what if the uncertainty concerns not only the stability of democracy, but the presumed universality of liberal-representative democracy as the privileged form of political legitimacy itself? Political theory frequently treats disagreement as occurring within a shared political world, where competing actors seek representation, recognition, or participation through broadly common institutions. Pluriversal approaches unsettle this assumption by asking how politics changes when the constitution of the political world itself is contested.
The panel invites theoretical and empirically grounded contributions examining political coexistence across heterogeneous political worlds. It is particularly interested in forms of collective life that cannot be adequately reduced to the categories of liberal representation, state sovereignty, electoral participation, or a singular trajectory of political development. Possible contributions may address Indigenous and non-Western political thought, autonomy and commons, post-development and Buen Vivir, decolonial political theory, legal and jurisdictional plurality, ecological and more-than-human politics, or alternative practices of collective decision-making.
Rather than interpreting contemporary conflict through bounded and internally homogeneous “civilizations,” the panel examines encounters, translations, asymmetries, and conflicts among political worlds whose boundaries are themselves historically produced and contested. This raises difficult questions. How can collective decisions be made when actors disagree over who or what constitutes a political subject, legitimate authority, territory, or community? Can political institutions accommodate radically different forms of life without translating them back into a single dominant framework? Does pluriversal coexistence nevertheless require shared norms, and if so, who can legitimately formulate them?
In this sense, democratic uncertainty becomes an opportunity to rethink governance rather than merely restore existing representative institutions. The panel seeks dialogue among supportive, critical, and comparative perspectives on whether democratic politics can become pluriversal: not the incorporation of many voices into one predetermined political world, but the difficult construction of relations among many worlds.