Deliberation and Anti-Deliberation in the Western Balkans

This open access book examines deliberative and anti-deliberative practices in post-conflict contexts marked by democratic backsliding. It compares how deliberative ideals are upheld and violated across different deliberative domains, including parliaments, citizens’ assemblies, social media and engagement between local and international actors. The authors identify anti-deliberation as the active violation of deliberative norms through exclusion, manipulation and domination, along with weaponisation of difference. The expansion of anti-deliberation restricts the space for good-quality deliberation and accelerates democratic backsliding.This edited collection is useful to scholars of democracy, deliberation and communication with its novel comparative perspective on the quality of deliberation, to policy-makers and civil society with its lessons for supporting deliberation, and to international peace-builders working on democratisation and reversing democratic backsliding.

Ivor Sokolic is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Hertfordshire and Visiting Fellow at the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. Denisa Kostovicova is Professor of Global Politics at the European Institute and Lead of the LSEE Research on South East Europe Programme at the Hellenic Observatory, both at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. Irena Fiket is Senior Research Fellow and Academic Coordinator of the Laboratory for Active Citizenship and Democratic Innovations at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Serbia.