"Dancing Around Democracy: Conduct and Counter-conduct in EU-Tunisia Politics of Democracy Assistance"

Mette Brynolf Cáceres — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 13:15:00 +0100

Some scholarship on democratization and on democracy assistance policies suggests the EU may have or at least aims for a democratising effect on Middle Eastern counterparts.
Other research shows MENA governments resist democratization by appropriating the EUs normative language to subvert democratic reform, reinforcing autocracy. Poststructuralist scholarship helps understand this ebb and flow of norm diffusion as a contest of conduct/counter-conduct between governments. Productive though this perspective is, it remains limited.
Once the populations are introduced, the picture changes substantively.
Mapping actors discursive construction of democracy in the case of Tunisia shows governmental actors conceptions are much closer than appears from government-to-government analysis, both focusing on thin understandings of democracy which conflate selected civil-political rights with human rights tout court while eliding socio-economic rights and deferring social justice over an indefinite future time horizon. By contrast, the Tunisian population has a holistic and substantive understanding of democracy.
This suggests the need to generalise current analyses of EU/MENA norm diffusion by reversing it and viewing it not as a bilateral dynamic but as a three-way conductive/counter-conductive contest wherein government-level actors attempt to counter-conduct citizens, undermining EU normative power and delegitimising democracy itself in the process.

Professor Teti is an expert on EU-Middle East politics, and he has published widely on democratization, Egyptian politics, and Continental political theory. His publications include Democratization vs Democracy (2020), The Arab Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan (2018), and Informal Power in the Greater Middle East (2014).

Funded By:
The Centre for new critical politics and Governance (CPG)
The Research Programme on Political Futurity in and beyond Democracy (PolFut)

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Materialized Science Fiction: Speculative Narratives as Infrastructure for Corporate Power and Governance

Bende Ingvorsen — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 11:00:00 +0200

Visiting Scholar lecture by Ali Rza Takale, Roskilde University

Silicon Valley's most powerful figures do not merely borrow their ideas from science fiction; they build the world with it. This lecture develops the framework of materialized science fiction to show how speculative narratives - Asimov's Foundation, Tolkien's palantíri, Stephenson's Snow Crash - are converted into working infrastructure: surveillance platforms, rocket programmes, financial instruments and company towns. Drawing on Palantir's "technological republic", SpaceX's 2026 flotation and Starbase, the corporate settlement in South Texas where a private firm sets the rules of local government, it argues that these fictions do not simply legitimate corporate power after the fact. They organise it, supplying a vocabulary in which private authority appears as destiny and democratic deliberation as obsolete delay. At stake is not only who owns the technologies of the future but who is authorised to imagine it. The lecture closes by asking how science fiction's imaginative resources might be reclaimed for democratic rather than corporate ends.

Bio
Ali Rza Takale is External Lecturer at Roskilde University and an editor of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory. He writes on speculative fiction, finance and political power, and is the author of Post-Politics in Context (Routledge) and Fictional Worlds and Financial Realities in Speculative Literature and Film (Palgrave, forthcoming).

Funded by:The Research Programme on Political Futurity in and beyond Democracy (PolFut)

Poster
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"Dancing Around Democracy: Conduct and Counter-conduct in EU-Tunisia Politics of Democracy Assistance"

Materialized Science Fiction: Speculative Narratives as Infrastructure for Corporate Power and Governance