Seemingly Unremarkable: Democratic Deliberation in the Neighborhoods of Paris

• In Event: Ethnography and Political Theory

Abstract

Deliberative practices in everyday settings—from religious organizations to activist groups and Qat chews—have been lauded for fostering democratic attachments even in contexts otherwise inhospitable to democratic politics (see e.g. Polletta 2002 and Wedeen 2008). Within such inhospitable settings, everyday democratic deliberation is remarkable. But what about less remarkable settings—what sort of work do deliberative practices perform there?

Combining participant observation and political theory, this paper focuses on neighborhood meetings in Paris in 2015. The government of the city of Paris extols neighborhood meetings as sites for “participatory democracy,” yet the stakes in such meetings are low, and their substance often uninteresting. I argue, however, that paying attention to the form of these meetings—rather than their substance—can help us unlock their significance.

By examining neighborhood meetings that took place both before and after the terrorist attacks of November 2015, I show how such meetings function as sites for the reproduction of a set of national narratives and attachments, some more avowedly democratic than others: the reliability of the bureaucratic state, particularly during national emergencies; the significance of deliberative practices; and who is a legitimate democratic interlocutor allowed to partake in deliberation while others are subtly (but efficiently) excluded.

The paper contributes to a substantive discussion of the work done by deliberative practices in modern democracies. It also illustrates how ethnographic work can illuminate the way in which concepts dear to democratic theory decant into everyday practice.

Author

• Yuna Blajer de la Garza, Stanford University