Course Overview

From long-established democracies to rising autocracies, democratic citizens are losing faith in their institutions. Courts, parliaments, regulatory agencies, public universities, and public administrations are increasingly perceived as captured, hollowed out, or disconnected from the social and political worlds they are meant to sustain.

Under the pressures of vast economic inequality, volatile nationalisms, crumbling state infrastructure, massive technological disruption, consolidating corporate power, and an unfolding global climate catastrophe, we are turning to democracy’s institutions with anxiety, skepticism, and even with suspicion. This institutional crisis is a sign of eroding political trust and one of the causes of intensifying democratic fragility. Yet it has also generated a demand: not for the abandonment of democratic institutions, but for their reconstruction, re-legitimation, and renewal.

Rather than treating institutions as fixed containers of political life or as outcomes of elite design, this course approaches them as historical and political achievements, shaped through conflict, mobilization, negotiation, and collective imagination.

The central focus of the course is the open question of what potential democratic institutions hold for responding to the political challenges of the twenty-first century. How are claims articulated in the language of protest, resistance, and social justice transformed into durable institutions? When do bottom-up initiatives succeed in producing institutions that are both democratically legitimate and practically effective? How are democratic institutions failing: through cooptation, bureaucratic neutralization, or repression? How can institutions remain open to contestation without losing their capacity to govern? Amid polarized publics, contested rights regimes, and declining trust, how can democratic institutions be restored?

By foregrounding institution (re)building as a democratic practice, the course challenges both technocratic and anti-institutional responses to democratic decline. The course will employ an interdisciplinary perspective and global scope, comparing democratic contexts across time and space. To this end, the course will foster a robust dialogue among students, activists, legal professionals, and scholars assembled from all over the world.

Ultimately, participants will leave the course with a new understanding of democracy as the ongoing work of constructing institutions capable of channeling conflict, sustaining trust, and enabling collective self-rule.

Participants

Paweł Bącal, European University Institute; Calvin Bell III, Northwestern University; Suhash Bhattacharjee, National Institute of Technology Silchar; Elena Čavlin, University of Belgrade; Andjela Djordjevic, University of Ljubljana; Iva Đolović, University of Belgrade; Rebecca Duras, University of Niš; Jaikirti Havlick, Arizona State University, Mina Ilić, University of Belgrade; Aleksandar Ivković, University of Belgrade; Olugbenga Joseph, Northwestern University; Prerna Khobragade, Northwestern University; Melek Kılıçgedik, İstanbul Nişantaşı University & Marmara University; Keti Kvizhinadze, University of Siena; Elda Marku Aleksandër, Moisiu University; Igor Muidža, University of Belgrade; Jay Nelson, Northwestern University; Goran Novaković, University of Belgrade; Kristina Rishko, HSE University (Higher School of Economics); Nahum Shemi, Rice University; Marina Slhessarenko Barreto, University of São Paulo; Helena Stolnik Trenkic, University of Cambridge; Yejia Sun, Northwestern University; Elena Trajkovska, Goce Delcev University; Mounica Sreesai Vegi, Northwestern University; Tong Yi, École Normale Supérieure-PSL; Ammar Zafar, University of Liverpool