https://warwick.ac.uk/research/priorities/internationaldevelopment/lgd/

Special Issue Call for Papers

‘Development, Democracy and Culture: towards sustainable

justice’

edited by John Clammer and Jonathan Vickery

In a time of huge religious, political and territorial conflict, the cultural dimension of place, identity,

values, and governance, is all too easily ignored. The last special issue of the Journal of Law,

Social Justice and Global Development was concerned with Cultural Rights (Culture and Human

Rights). The UN’s webpage on democracy states that “Democracy is a universally recognized ideal

and….provides an environment for the protection and effective realization of human rights”. This

special issue is given to the question of democracy. How have global cultural policies and

development policies emerged in part through a quest for the “ideal” of democracy? How do

cultural policies operationalise “democratisation” in development situations, or perhaps imagine

alternative ideals of democracy, or simulate alternative forms of democratic life (participation,

equality, liberty)? The 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, and then the

2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, both

appealed to the values of democracy. But what form of democracy is most effective in their

implementation? What happened to the discourse on democracy and development that featured

milestone texts like the World Commission on Culture and Development’s Our Creative Diversity

(1966), or Towards a Constructive Pluralism (UNESCO, 1999), or Boutros-Ghali’s The Interaction

between Democracy and Development (UNESCO, 2002). What happened to the notion that

cultural pluralism was a road to democratisation, and why do policies on multiculturalism no longer

seem to promise a vibrant participatory “culture” of democracy for the brave new “globalised”

world?

This Special Issue is a forum for dialogue for the journal's principle multidisciplinary fields of legal,

social and development research. It aims to attract research papers on (but not limited to) the

following topics:

• Democracy, culture and development

• Cultural democracy and cultural democratisation

• Cultural Rights, Human Rights and democracy

• Democracy in international treatises and UN conventions on culture

• Cultural Policies and democracy (particularly in relation to equalities participatory policies)

• Multiculturalism and political pluralism

• Cultural Sustainability and/as democracy

• Culture as Religion and democracy

• Local democracy, communities and self-management

• Democracy, the arts and cultural sectors (global or Global South perspectives)

Abstracts of 250-300 words (including short bibliography) to be submitted in the first

instance, by 1st November 2018 to the journal's Editors in Chief:

Dr Rajnaara Akhtar: rajnaara.akhtar@dmu.ac.uk

Dr Jonathan Vickery: J.P.Vickery@warwick.ac.uk

Full papers of between 5,000 -- 8,000 words will be invited for submission (and peerreview)

by 1st April 2019.