This essay argues for a transformative approach to democracy to address crises affecting communities and the planet, suggesting new practices and perspectives.
This essay argues that the democratic practices and ethos we require today must be relentlessly and radically reparative in relation to past and present ways of life that threaten human and planetary well-being. Such an orientation transmogrifies what democracy means and entails, including its temporalities, ontologies, and spatialities, as well as its notions of justice, freedom, and equality. The essay begins by identifying the crises and lingering damages of “fossil modernity” and the overdetermined exhaustion of liberal democracy. It then adumbrates features of reparative democracy, in theory and practice. It concludes with a discussion of one contemporary instance of reparative democracy, #StopCopCity, the mobilization against clearing a forest adjacent to impoverished Black neighborhoods in Atlanta, Georgia, for the building of a militarized police training facility.
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Wendy Brown (2026) studied this question.
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