This original and ambitious work looks anew at a series of intellectual debates about the meaning of democracy. Clive Barnett engages with key thinkers in various traditions of democratic theory and demonstrates the importance of a geographical imagination in interpreting contemporary political change. Debates about radical democracy, Barnett argues, have become trapped around a set of oppositions between deliberative and agonistic theories - contrasting thinkers who promote the possibility of rational agreement and those who seek to unmask the role of power or violence or difference in shaping human affairs. While these debates are often framed in terms of consensus versus contestation, Barnett unpacks the assumptions about space and time that underlie different understandings of the sources of political conflict and shows how these differences reflect deeper philosophical commitments to theories of creative action or revived ontologies of "the political." Rather than developing ideal theories of democracy or models of proper politics, he argues that attention should turn toward the practices of claims-making through which political movements express experiences of injustice and make demands for recognition, redress, and re pair. By rethinking the spatial grammar of discussions of public space, democratic inclusion, and globalization, Barnett develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the crucial roles played by geographical processes in generating and processing contentious politics.

Few other texts on this subject are so comprehensive or interdisciplinary - this handbook draws together approaches to social change from across different fields of academic research, policy and activism. Contributors drawn from various disciplines including anthropology, human geography, political sociology, and development studies. Up-to-date introduction covering current and emerging methodologies, practices and topics.

This book rethinks the public - along with public communication and public action - in a globalizing and mediated world. Web-based interactions, community empowerment initiatives, participation experiments, transnational struggles, and new ways of understanding and occupying public space offer a range of promising speculations about the renewal of publics and 'publicness.' The book offers a rich set of methodological resources on which researchers can draw, demonstrating the need to interrogate the boundaries between theory, research, and politics. It develops novel theoretical perspectives for investigating the formation of publics, using four themes as key processes to rethinking how publics are brought into being and how to develop research agendas into their formation.

This original and ambitious work looks anew at a series of intellectual debates about the meaning of democracy. Clive Barnett engages with key thinkers in various traditions of democratic theory and demonstrates the importance of a geographical imagination in interpreting contemporary political change. Debates about radical democracy, Barnett argues, have become trapped around a set of oppositions between deliberative and agonistic theories - contrasting thinkers who promote the possibility of rational agreement and those who seek to unmask the role of power or violence or difference in shaping human affairs. While these debates are often framed in terms of consensus versus contestation, Barnett unpacks the assumptions about space and time that underlie different understandings of the sources of political conflict and shows how these differences reflect deeper philosophical commitments to theories of creative action or revived ontologies of "the political." Rather than developing ideal theories of democracy or models of proper politics, he argues that attention should turn toward the practices of claims-making through which political movements express experiences of injustice and make demands for recognition, redress, and re pair. By rethinking the spatial grammar of discussions of public space, democratic inclusion, and globalization, Barnett develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the crucial roles played by geographical processes in generating and processing contentious politics.

'This volume successfully exposes the "ghostly presence" of democracy in the field of geography and shows the value of thinking about democracy geographically. It is a major contribution to serious examination of a normative political issue from a geographical perspective. This is welcome above all because geography is a field whose cultural and economic branches, though often claiming the appellation "critical," are currently dominated by unexamined radical political fantasies' - "John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles

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In an historically unprecedented way, democracy is now increasingly seen as a universal model of legitimate rule.This work addresses the key question: How can democracy be understood in theory and in practise?

In three thematically organised sections, Spaces of Democracy uses a critical geographical imagination (informed by thinking on space, place, and scale) to interrogate the latest work in democratic theory. Key ideas and concepts discussed include globalization and transnationalism; representation; citizenship; liberalism; the city and public space; and the media.

This volume comprises commissioned work by leading academics investigating democracy. Historical and comparative, animated by wider debates on globalization, it will facilitate the critical discussion of core questions on citizenship, the state, and democracy. Spaces of Democracy is essential reading for students of human geography, political science/international relations, and political sociology.

'This volume successfully exposes the "ghostly presence" of democracy in the field of geography and shows the value of thinking about democracy geographically. It is a major contribution to serious examination of a normative political issue from a geographical perspective. This is welcome above all because geography is a field whose cultural and economic branches, though often claiming the appellation "critical," are currently dominated by unexamined radical political fantasies' - "John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles

"

In an historically unprecedented way, democracy is now increasingly seen as a universal model of legitimate rule.This work addresses the key question: How can democracy be understood in theory and in practise?

In three thematically organised sections, Spaces of Democracy uses a critical geographical imagination (informed by thinking on space, place, and scale) to interrogate the latest work in democratic theory. Key ideas and concepts discussed include globalization and transnationalism; representation; citizenship; liberalism; the city and public space; and the media.

This volume comprises commissioned work by leading academics investigating democracy. Historical and comparative, animated by wider debates on globalization, it will facilitate the critical discussion of core questions on citizenship, the state, and democracy. Spaces of Democracy is essential reading for students of human geography, political science/international relations, and political sociology.