Migrant Activists as Insurgent Citizens: Diversity and Direct Democracy Within Occupy Slovenia (Research Brief)
July 20, 2012
My research is an ethnographic examination of the organizational and decision-making practices developed around what came to be known as 15o or Occupy Slovenia. I conclude that earlier activist efforts by migrants and their allies to confront dominant xenophobic policies, especially by encouraging migrants to speak and act for themselves, have contributed to the development of a distinctive and minoritarian form of direct democracy that has successfully facilitated broad participation. These practices serve as an implicit critique of how majoritarian democracy has functioned in postsocialist Europe and beyond. They also offer one model of how the exclusionary ethnonationalist politics that have defined the past two decades in the former Yugoslavia might be overcome.
Maple Razsa, of Colby College,was a 2011-2012 Individual Advanced Research Opportunities (IARO) fellow.
