"Introduction. Narrating the Crisis of Democracy: Law, Literature and Culture"

This introduction examines the crisis of democracy through the perspectives of legal theory, literature and cultural studies. It reviews influential accounts of democratic transformation—including post-democracy, illiberal democracy, democratic recession, backsliding and erosion—and places them in dialogue with Derrida’s conception of democracy as constitutively unfinished and vulnerable. Drawing on the Law and Literature tradition, the introduction argues that democratic crises must be analysed not only as institutional failures but also through the narratives, symbolic forms and cultural imaginaries that shape political communities’ understandings of law, citizenship and belonging. The contributions to the Special Issue therefore explore cultural texts as sites in which democratic tensions are interpreted, contested and reconfigured.