Focus: Narrating the Crisis of Democracy: Law, Literature and Culture

This Special Issue examines how contemporary literary, cinematic and cultural texts narrate democratic crisis and reconfigure the relationship between law, representation and political community. Its contributions are organised around three interconnected perspectives: democracy as narrative, democracy as inclusion and exclusion, and democracy as embodied experience. The essays explore crisis as a condition in which established political and legal narratives lose their explanatory force, while questions of citizenship, belonging, participation and recognition are renegotiated. Through analyses of dystopian fiction, memoir, activism, refugee narratives, LGBTQ+ discourse, carceral spaces and body-horror cinema, the issue considers democratic vulnerability across diverse geographical, institutional and cultural contexts. It argues that cultural texts do more than represent institutional decline: they expose the exclusions and power relations embedded in democratic orders and open spaces for alternative forms of political imagination. In this sense, literature and culture become essential sites for testing the meanings and possibilities of democratic life.