Cohort: POLS 39

Topic of the thesis: Democratic self-defense

Abstract: The project aims at giving a practical response to the debate on democratic self-defense. For this purpose, the three main models of defense, political, social, and legal model, will be considered, and it will be argued that the former two may contribute to improving the quality of democracy but are ineffective in defending democratic institutions in critical situations, while the legal model, also known as militant democracy, is the only one that guarantees, thorough legal intervention and policies of exclusion, the ability to defend democracy from its inner and external enemies. Any democracy should be potentially militant at least when the other two models are doomed to fail, and in order to make them applicable again. Although fears about potential abuse lead to limitations of militant democracy and therefore to the need for a minimal account of "militancy", it is unclear how to define what counts as minimal. The project objective is not to rely on fixed conceptual distinctions that may end up being arbitrary in their application, but on pragmatic guidelines that stem from a theory of democracy as a system that must be able to deal with conflicts

Research interests: Normative political theory, theories of democracy

Graduated from: Università degli studi di Genova

Degrees obtained: MA in Philosophic Methodologies

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