This seminar is part of the monthly RCPS Lecture Series hosted by the Radboud Center for Philosophy and Society.
Please note, that should you have a cold or other illness symptoms, or have had such symptoms in the preceding 4 to 5 days, you are kindly requested to either attend online or wear an FFP2 mask during the meeting, which will be provided on location.
Registration
Students and staff are warmly invited to join the event. No registration is required.
Speaker
Abstract
Moving into the eye of the storm(ing)
Stormings have been a frequent and widespread phenomenon in recent years, and they are intriguing examples of political contestation. Even though recent examples attack similar institutions of public authority and governance, they are widely disparately interpreted. Some are viewed as threat to the formal institutionalization of (democratic) governance (like the 2021 storming of the Capitol in Washington D.C.; Crothers and Burgener 2021), while others instead are seen as a significant moment of political contestation and resistance (like the 2019 storming of the Legislative Council Complex in Hong Kong; Tsz-him 2021). To complicate matters further, several stormings have played, or have been recorded as, (symbolically) significant moments throughout history: as the harbinger of revolution, as fundamental upheavals of political order, and sometimes even as the epitome of popular sovereignty (Sewell 2005, 236).
How, then, should we understand their political and democratic significance? In order to finally answer such a question, my project needs a specific understanding of what moments came to be known as stormings and in what sense. However, as soon as you start taking inventory of stormings, it’s as if you’re opening Pandora’s box: there are many different moments described as ‘storming’ that vary greatly from one another, making it difficult to formulate a clear (core) definition of what sort of actions they are. There is no overarching political theory that has considered stormings as a form of political contestation while taking into account this wide variety. In this talk, I would like to explain how I compiled the ‘inventory’ and thereby show the variety of stormings. As a first step toward a political theory of stormings, I then propose a number of ‘ideal types’ that account for this variation.
Finally, I would like to discuss how to go back to political and democratic theory from there. While (a part of) contemporary democratic theory has recognized that ‘the people’ and their demands will always exceed any type of formal institutionalization, and therefore has emphasized the significance of ‘dissenting’ and ‘contentious’ political actors and actions (Colón Ríos 2012; Kalyvas 2005; Laclau and Mouffe 2001; Mouffe 2000, 2005; Negri 2009; Rancière 1999; Wolin 1996), this scholarship has not been systematically applied to stormings. How to concretely conceptualize the democratic significance of stormings as an act of political contestation therefore still remains an open question. Should we understand them as attempts of self-legislation and constituent power, or rather as a revolutionary intervention that (only) dismantles the old order? Is it more productive to understand them through their ‘effects’ such as regime changes, or through their symbolic significance(s)? In other words, I would like to discuss what the interplay between an analysis of different types of stormings and democratic/political theory might look like, and what possible approaches there are to understanding the democratic significance of stormings.
