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Enmity and Democratic Legitimacy: A Reconsideration

Date
-
Speaker
Hussein Banai, Associate Professor of International Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington
Location
Graham Stuart Lounge - Encina Hall West, Room 400
Abstract

In standard deliberative and liberal accounts of democratic legitimacy, enmity – i.e. mutual dislike and active ill-will between political opponents – is seen as a byproduct of unreason: an emotional forcefield tempered by a robust regime of rights, rational discourse, and consensus through compromise. Agonistic democrats, by contrast, view conflict and contestation as a “condition of possibility” for politics in the first place, and hence regard non-violent adversarial politics as the basis for democratic legitimacy. All three accounts rest on an assumption about enmity as an essentially expressive dynamic that could be detected in speech and behavior of political actors. But what if enmity toward others is a tacit motivation behind certain stated views and actions that do not otherwise explicitly violate the terms of rational discourse or legitimate adversarial politics – and which overtime undermine democracy through polarization and erosion of trust in public procedures and institutions? Can the political legitimacy of democracy be sustained if major political disagreements are driven by such motivations? This is a critical but neglected aspect of normative discussions around democratic legitimacy that also increasingly afflict everyday politics in democratic societies today (e.g. in debates about immigration policy, zoning laws, public school reforms, etc.). This paper offers a reframing of democratic legitimacy based on the challenges posed by enmity and argues that of the three predominant conceptions of democratic legitimacy, the liberal perspective, with its emphasis on the principle of equal respect for persons as a justificatory moral basis for free and equal citizenship, has the potential to most optimally address the challenges posed by enmity.

Biography

Hussein "Huss" Banai is an Associate Professor of International Studies in the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he is also faculty affiliate in the departments of Political Science, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and Central Eurasian Studies. He is also a Research Affiliate at the Center for International Studies at MIT.

Banai's research interests lie at the intersection of political thought and international relations, with a special focus on topics in democratic theory, non-Western liberal thought, diplomatic history and theory, US-Iran relations, and Iran’s political development. He has published on these topics in academic, policy, and popular periodicals. He is the author of Hidden Liberalism: Burdened Visions of Progress in Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2020); co-author of two volumes on US-Iran relations: Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the US-Iran Conflict (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) and Becoming Enemies: U.S.-Iran Relations and the Iran-Iraq War, 1979–1988 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012); and co-editor of Human Rights at the Intersections: Transformation through Local, Global, and Cosmopolitan Challenges (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023). 

Banai is Lead Book Editor of Review of International Studies, the flagship review journal of the International Studies Association. From 2018 to 2020, he served as an Associate Editor (for Social Sciences) of Iranian Studies, the journal of the Association for Iranian Studies. In addition to his scholarly work, he frequently comments on Iran-related issues in the media. His interviews and comments on current events have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Voice of America, Time, NPR, NBC News Online, CNN Online, BBC News, BBC Persian Service, The National Interest, Persia Digest, U.S. News & World Report, Inside Higher Ed, and The Huffington Post.