Deliberation in Protests and Social Movements

The chapter addresses the relations between social movements and deliberative democracy, pointing at opportunities but also at tensions in theorization and practices of democracy. While social movements are important for deliberative democracy, and vice versa, activists and deliberative democrats alike have addressed a number of tensions between deliberative democracy and protest. The global diffusion of deliberative norms, practices, and experiences of democracy in social movements is discussed in the light of the growing literature on deliberative democracy. In particular, faced with challenges to the legitimacy and efficacy of representative democracy, social movements’ democratic innovations, such as the Forum and the Camp, represent important experiments in cooperation in settings of deep diversity and inequality. In addition, the reflections on social movements’ conceptions and practices help in specifying some conceptualization of deliberative politics.