Our next episode of the Druckfrisch book discussion series features The D-Word: Perspectives on Democracy in Tumultuous Times, edited by Christi van der Westhuizen, Siphiwe Dube, and Zwelethu Jolobe. This collection brings together critical perspectives from the Global South on the evolving challenges faced by democracy. Covering fields from philosophy to socio-legal studies and activism, the book bridges national and conceptual divides, offering new insights on democracy’s future.

About the Book

The D-Word: Perspectives on Democracy in Tumultuous Times

This curated collection engages international debates about the current challenges facing democracy. Given the proliferation of “crisis” literature on democracy, this volume finds its distinctive niche in presenting perspectives from the global margins that bridge disciplinary, sectoral, national and conceptual divides. South Africans enter into conversation with scholars and activists from elsewhere in the Global South, including the Arab world and the rest of Africa, and from the European periphery. Insights on democracy are offered from a diversity of perspectives and voices, spanning philosophy, socio-legal and political studies, sociology, public administration, and queer and gender studies and activism. The book will be of interest to academics, activists, policymakers, development planners, and the general public.

The Panel

Editor at the event

Author at the event

Author at the event

Commentary

Moderation

This edition of ReCentGlobe’s Druckfrisch Book Launch features the book “Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness” with the editors Shona Hunter and our guest professor Christi van der Westhuizen. They were joined by the contributors Sarah Heinz and Mark Schmitt in conversation with discussant Evangelia Kindinger.

Christi van der Westhuizen (Nelson Mandela University, South Africa), Associate Professor and Senior Researcher, is the head of the Research Programme at Centre for the Advancement of Non-Racialism and Democracy (CANRAD). She was invited on a Visiting Professorship to Leipzig University, Germany, in 2022.

Shona Hunter (Leeds Beckett University, UK) is a Reader in the Carnegie School of Education. She is the Programme Director for Research Degrees in the School and is a member of the Centre for Race Education and Decoloniality.

Sarah Heinz (University of Vienna, Austria), has been interested in the specific role that literary and cultural texts have in shaping our sense of self and our perception of the world and others. Literatures and cultures provide us with scripts and ideals of who (and how) to be and lead our lives, but they can also question norms that we often take for granted.

Mark Schmitt (TU Dortmund, Germany), is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Languages, Literature and Culture at TU Dortmund. His transdisciplinary work is situated in contemporary British literature and culture, cultural theory and Critical Whiteness studies among others.

Evangelia Kindinger (HU Berlin, Germany), is Junior Professor for American Literature and Culture at Humboldt-Universität Berlin. She holds a PhD from Ruhr-Universität Bochum with the dissertation titled Homebound – Diaspora Selves and Spaces in Greek American Return Narratives.

In this edition of Druckfrisch Book Discussion, Austin Glatthorn (University of Southampton) discussed his book “Music Theatre and the Holy Roman Empire” with Ellinor Forster (Innsbruck), Barbara Babić (Leipzig), and Axel Körner (Leipzig).

The interdisciplinary study “Music Theatre and the Holy Roman Empire: The German Musical Stage at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century” by Austin Glatthorn was published by Cambridge University Press in July 2022. It reveals the interconnected world of music theatre during the ‘Classical era’.

The event took place as part of the ERC Study day, which is organised by the ERC Project “Opera and the Politics of Empire in Habsburg Europe, 1815–1914” in cooperation with the Centre of Competence for Theatre (CCT) and the Leipzig Research Centre Global Dynamics (ReCentGlobe).

In this edition of Druckfrisch we discussed the book “The American Revolution and the Habsburg Monarchy” with author Jonathan Singerton.

The book presents the American Revolution from the perspective of the Habsburg monarchy. It reveals how, despite seeming antithetical to the American cause, the Habsburg dynasty and people in the Habsburg lands realized the opportunity unleashed by the creation of the thirteen United States of America, demonstrating the wider effects of the American Revolution beyond the standard Atlantic World and portraying the Habsburg Monarchy in a new, oceanic light.

Chair: Maren Röger, Leibniz-Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Europa (GWZO)

Reply: Jonathan Singerton, Universität Innsbruck

In this edition of Druckfrisch Book Discussion, Sandrine Kott (Université de Genève) discussed her book “Organiser le monde. Une autre histoire de la guerre froide” (SEUIL) with Katja Castryck-Naumann (GWZO), Antje Dietze (SFB1199), and Martin Deuerlein (University of Tübingen). An English translation of the book is now available under the title “A World More Equal. An Internationalist Perspective on the Cold War” at Columbia University Press.

By adopting an international perspective, the book challenges the usual interpretation of the post-World War II period too often reduced to the Cold War seen as a global conflict between the United States and the USSR that would have dominated international affairs. This book looks at international organizations and associations as stages on which the Cold War discourse was deployed, but which are above all, especially their secretariats, spaces for dialogue and working together across the ideological divisions of the Cold War. It tells the story of this period through the prism of internationalism as an ideology and a social practice.

Druckfrisch Book Discussion is an event series by ReCentGlobe and the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH).

This edition was organized in cooperation with:

In this edition of ReCentGlobe’s Druckfrisch Book Discussion, organised jointly with the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), will feature the book “Global Easts - Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing” (Columbia University Press) with South Korean historian Jie-Hyun Lim. He was joined in the discussion by Katja Castryck-Naumann and Frank Hadler (both GWZO Leipzig).

The book, which was published in July 2022, explores entangled Easts to reconsider global history from the margins. Examining the politics of history and memory, Lim reveals the affinities linking Eastern Europe and East Asia. He draws out commonalities in their experiences of modernity, in their transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and in the shaping of collective memory. Ranging across Poland, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Korea, Lim traces the global history of how notions of victimhood have become central to nationalism. He criticizes mass dictatorships of right and left in the Global Easts, considering Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereign dictatorship and the concept of decisionist democracy. Lim argues that nationalism is inherently transnational, critiquing how the nationalist imagination of the Global East has influenced countries across borders.

More about the book

Jie-Hyun Lim is professor of transnational history and director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University. He is coeditor of Mnemonic Solidarity: Global Interventions (2021), The Palgrave Handbook of Mass Dictatorship (2016), and Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives (2011), among many other works.

This edition of ReCentGlobe’s Druckfrisch Book Discussions on march 07 2023 at ReCentGlobe features the book “African Activists in a Decolonising World: The Making of an Anticolonial Culture, 1952–1966” by Ismay Milford, published by Cambridge University Press in the Global and International History Series. Three experts in the field joins the author Ismay Milford to critique the book and discuss its contributions to the global history of anticolonialism and decolonisation.

Author:

Discussants:

Ana Moledo is a PhD student in the project ‘“Free radicals”? Political mobilities and postcolonial re-spatialization processes in the second half of the 20th century’ within the SFB 1199 at Leipzig University. Her research interests lie in the field of global and transnational history, particularly with regard to colonialism and decolonization, transnational activism and radical politics and the Cold War in Southern Africa.

Dr John Njenga Karugia is a researcher at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, and an independent consultant. His research specialisms include Chinese migration to Africa and the Indian Ocean as a memory space.

Dr Mariusz Lukasiewicz is a historian of Southern Africa, based at the Leipzig University Centre for African Studies, with research and teaching interests in the history of economic institutions, financial intermediaries and business organisations.

Chair:

About the book:

For more info, see the publisher:

At the next edition of Druckfrisch Book Discussion, Pierre Hazan (Geneva) will present his new book “Negotiating with the Devil: Inside the World of Armed Conflict Mediation”.

Comment by: Steffi Marung (Leipzig)

Organized in cooperation with the Global and European Studies Institute.

After many years in the little-known world of back-channel mediation, helping sworn adversaries to prevent, manage or resolve conflict, Pierre Hazan felt compelled to re-examine the acute practical and ethical dilemmas that affected his work in Bosnia, Ukraine, the Sahel and the Central African Republic. What is the mediator’s responsibility when two belligerents conclude a peace agreement to the detriment of a third? Should mediators never be party to ‘ethnic cleansing’, even if it saves lives? Is a fragile peace worth sacrificing justice for—or will that sacrifice fuel another cycle of violence?

In an increasingly dystopian world, Negotiating with the Devil offers both practical guidelines and a moral compass for mediators whose field of action has transformed dramatically. We have gone from soft to hard power; from ‘peace dividends’ to war in Europe; from the end of one Cold War to a new East–West confrontation in Ukraine; from Pax Americana to a multipolar world; from the dream of an all-powerful UN to the organisation’s marginalisation.

Against this tapestry, Hazan sheds light on the complex work of those steering peace negotiations, blending vivid first-hand observation with sharp insights into the psychology of compromise as a first step towards peace.