Genocide and Democratic Theory (MANCEPT Workshop 2026)

As Israel continues its genocide in Gaza and genocidal violence continues to be waged against the Rohingya in Myanmar, Uyghurs in China, the people of Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen and other places, this calls for the re-examination of the basic contours of democratic theory. What are the implications for our thinking about democracy and democratic ideals when a genocide is perpetrated, in the case of Israel, by a regime that understands itself and is understood by many to be a democracy? What does it mean when genocidal violence is supported and facilitated in one way or another by democracies? When some genocides are sidelined, minimized, or denied by democratic publics or even by left movements that appeal to democratic ideals? How should this affect our analyses of democracy, of its central commitments and tensions, its values and authority, its current crises and its futures? The goal of the workshop is to bring political philosophy and democratic theory into conversation with insights from genocide studies and other relevant fields.

Genocide has received relatively little attention from contemporary political philosophers (notable exceptions include contributions from Anne O’Byrne, Mathias Thaler, Larry May, Claudia Card). Few contributions consider it from the perspective of democratic theory. The logic and practice of genocide is usually seen to be the antithesis of a presumed universalistic and egalitarian ethos of liberal democracy. Helpful starting points for addressing this theoretical disconnect include Mahmood Mamdani’s (2020) genealogy of political modernity. The political anthropologist argues that nation-states (first as settler democracies) are created from an ethnonationalist logic for which ethnic cleansing and genocide are, if not inevitable, always an option. This logic has led to ongoing cycles of political violence as nation-building necessarily creates permanent minorities. Genocide scholar Dirk Moses (2021) has argued that a liberal notion of permanent security, which envisions the world to be secured from “enemies of humanity” in the name peace and self-determination, has been used to justify civilian destruction and mass displacements. Malcom Bull (2006) has polemically argued that liberal just war theory’s consideration of “supreme emergencies” and humanitarian interventions in “outlaw states” have allowed for the liberal justification of mass violence against civilian populations. Sociologist Michael Mann (2004) has suggested that murderous ethnic cleanings are the “dark side of democracy,” where the democratic ideal of rule by the people entwines the demos with the dominant ethnos. Philosopher Anne O’Byrne (2023) has emphasized the intricate tension between demos and genos, the “empty form of democratic citizenship” and the need for a people’s reproduction over time and the creation of boundaries of belonging (which are attacked by genocidal violence). 

Fellow philosopher Melanie Altanian (2024) has observed that long-term genocide denialism serves to “consolidate relations of domination through epistemic means”, with serious implications for the presumably egalitarian ethos of democracies. Indeed, theorist of psychoanalysis Sarah El Bulbeisi (2026) argues that the suppression of the Palestinian experience of violence serves a social function, especially in post-Holocaust Germany, where it enables the construction of “a national narrative of atonement and moral righteousness” despite the country’s historical and continuous entanglements in racializing and colonial violence. Meanwhile, these and other legacies of erasure and genocide denial have also significantly shaped scholarly debates. In response, environmental humanities scholar and theorist of ecocide Darya Tsymbalyuk (2022) has highlighted that academia ought to re-center embodied and uncomfortable knowledges, as its ongoing normalized detachment from the “wreck of reality” and lived experience reinforces hierarchies of knowledge—and thereby arguably undermines the egalitarian character of democratic deliberation. Concerningly, decolonial scholar Madina Tlostanova (2025) has observed that too often, these hierarchies of knowledge reinforce the hierarchies of suffering, fueling a binary either-or logic dividing the world into us and them, which effectively enables various forms of exceptionalism that fuel genocides, and in turn, fail to uphold humanity and protection of life for all. 

Against the backdrop of these persistent issues, workshop contributions will confront genocidal aspects and tendencies of (or at least seeds in) central concepts of democratic theory and political philosophy, such as peoplehood, popular sovereignty, majority rule, national self-determination, citizenship, security, and self-defense. How do seemingly emancipatory democratic ideals and rhetorics become intertwined with the large‑scale destruction of civilian life and social worlds? What does it mean when democratic publics authorize, support, tolerate, or deny such genocidal violence? What are blind spots of global left, decolonial and anticapitalist movements in recognizing and supporting victims of genocidal violence? How do colonial and imperial legacies shape who is removable, killable, and grievable? How does the so-called boundary problem of democratic theory relate to genocidal forms of boundary-drawing? How do anti-imperialist national movements avoid the pitfalls of postcolonial nationalism, and simultaneously, how can we better distinguish between the forms of ethnonationalism that drive genocides and the political forms of nationalism that resist the genocidal erasure and annihilation of a people? How do we imagine genuinely non-genocidal forms of political life (building on, for example, Wendy Brown’s notion of “reparative democracy” or Mamdani’s project of “decolonizing political community”)? And which approaches to knowledge making and political deliberation can best nurture such communities and support livable and equitable conditions across the world?

The discussions in the workshop are meant to be exploratory and generative. The workshop is open to contributions from various disciplines and philosophical traditions, and welcomes systematic and historical contributions and discussions of particular case studies, specific theoretical approaches, or individual thinkers. 

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words to [email protected]. The deadline is May 1, 2026. We will encourage participants to share a draft of their thoughts in some form (short paper, handout, etc.) by Aug. 1, if feasible. 

The workshop will be held in person on Sept. 2-4, 2026 as part of the annual MANCEPT Workshops. Please visit the conference website for information about costs and registration. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us directly ([email protected]).