Democratization and Struggles Against Injustice

This book aims at providing theoretical underpinning to the idea that, very often, the deepening21of democratic practice enacted by social movements can be directly attributed to the effort to identify, properly articulate, and promote solutions to social injustices. In other words, the need to collectively articulate grievances, to formulate justice claims, to make problems visible to the public and to oneself, to formulate solutions and organize effective (and just) collective action, in short, the building of an oppositional consciousness through “epistemic practices,” has substantially contributed to deepening our common understandings of what it means to participate in political life. My thesis is both an empirical hypothesis and a theoretical claim. On the one hand, it aims to account for the fact that struggles against injustice have, due precisely to their orientation against injustice and toward justice, in many cases substantially contributed to change our understanding of democracy in deeper ways. On the other hand, it aims at theoretically substantiating this hypothesis by arguing that the epistemic conditions for generating a collective consciousness against injustice have a democratizing potential.