This congress focuses on three primary questions:
1) How can democracy remain and become substantive?
2) What is the relationship between democracy and human rights?
3) How does democracy develop?
In this talk, I hope to address these questions by way of a historical-sociological examination of the Haitian Revolution, its implications for our understandings of citizenship, and how this impacts upon the current refugee crisis. Reclaiming democracy, for me, means reclaiming those silenced histories that nonetheless echo through time and thinking about how we can respond, even two centuries later, to the urgent demands made in these moments. Our responses in the present would need not only to go some way toward healing those earlier colonial wounds, but would also provide us with the space to talk about reparatory justice in the present – and here I am talking about the crisis for refugees that confronts us daily (which, in the distorted vision of our media and politicians, is presented rather as the crisis for Europe). To be able to talk about the present, however, I have to first talk about the past and to talk about the way that past is constructed within the dominant narratives circulating in the present.