The future of democracy across the globe is uncertain. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union led many to believe that democracy had triumphed over communism, but three decades later that conclusion appears incorrect. In the years after 2008, authoritarian populist regimes have marshaled their electoral successes to systematically dismantle the fabric of democracy. A growing number of scholars, journalists, and public figures despair that democracy, with its relatively shallow historical roots, is confronting an existential risk.

At the same time protest movements around the world have multiplied as they have addressed the deepening crises posed by climate change, migration, inequality, labor exploitation and their intersection with racial, ethnic, sexed, and gendered subjugation. These movements have provided new models of organizing and imagining democratic practice.

The Global Democracy Commons aims to help generate, energize, and understand democratic practices around the world, whatever idiom they use or from which position on the political spectrum they come. Our goal is to deepen and broaden our democratic imagination so that it is not confined to a set of electoral procedures or political institutions designed to express the collective will of individual political subjects. Instead we hope to encourage an understanding of democracy as a shared space oriented towards forging new bonds of solidarity and improving our collective lives in ways that often exceed the domain of politics.

A key part of our mission is to engage a range of publics beyond the academy in the making and dissemination of these new conceptions of democracy. We believe that a central mandate of Berkeley as a public university is to enrich the understanding and practice of democracy within the Bay Area and the state of California, as well as across the United States and the world.