Geographies of politics and the police: Post-democratization, SYRIZA, and the politics of the “Greek debt crisisâ€

Lazaros Karaliotas

Environment and Planning C, 2021, vol. 39, issue 3, 491-511

Abstract: This paper explores the entangled dynamics of de-politicization and re-politicization in the midst of the “Greek debt crisis.†Critically revisiting Jacques Rancière’s political writings, it argues that, despite common criticisms to the contrary, his oeuvre foregrounds the impurity of democratic politics. Rancière, the paper contends, offers critical heuristic tools in understanding and engaging with how processes of post-democratization and democratic politics intersect, become entangled, and are mutually constituted. Simultaneously, however, it also challenges Rancière’s almost exclusive emphasis on political subjectification to argue for a plural understanding of the modalities and spatialities of democratic politics. Reading the politics of the “Greek debt crisis†through this lens, the paper unpacks how post-democratization has unfolded through an uneven and contested geography articulated at multiple scales. In parallel, it also maps the diverse and impure modalities of democratic politics in crisis-ridden Greece: from the staging of disagreement through the 2011 squares movement to the articulation of everyday commoning and solidarity movements to SYRIZA’s meteoric rise to power. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how post-democratization and democratic politics are being shaped in constant relationship and tension.

Keywords: Rancière; post-democratization; democratic politics; Greek debt crisis; impure politics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2399654419876650 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:39:y:2021:i:3:p:491-511

DOI: 10.1177/2399654419876650

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().