“No to Mining, No to Consultation”: Deliberation as Criminalization and Anti-Colonial Struggle

A tradition that often traces back its roots to Ancient Greece, and what remains one of the most dominant strands of contemporary democratic theory, holds that assembly-based deliberation constitutes a corrective for, or even an ideal replacement of, weakening representative models of democracy. While often attributing the unjust outcomes of deliberative decision-making to procedural concerns and considerations around weak statehood, rather than a normative conflict in and of itself, theorists have ignored the possibility that the deliberative project can be not only a means of democratization through the redistribution of political power to everyday citizens, but also a means of entrenching existing structures of domination, de facto turning into yet another mechanism of criminalization of anti-colonial and anti-extractivist dissent. To understand this normative conflict, the entrenchment of both representative democratic systems and the colonial-extractive project, and engage in tracing anti-colonial deliberative theories, the essay follows C. L. R. James's appeal to anchor deliberative democracy's political project within the sites of domination and struggles for liberation: the contemporary shapes of the plantation.