ABSTRACT
Slow-motion ruptures are naturally much harder to spot, and to analyse, but arguably they must be central to the analysis of diasporas and democracy, or so the following reflections on territory, borders and cross-border democracy propose. Democracy will have a future, that is to say, only when our world is populated with democratic states that peacefully cooperate and work together to tame the anti-democratic effects of globalisation. The solution seems both strategically unrealistic and conceptually unimaginative. Unrealistic because it underestimates the major political risks posed to democracy by the spread across borders of chains of predatory power. Authoritarian regimes and diasporas hostile to power-sharing democracy regularly interfere with the workings of nation-state democracies from a distance. Within the field of democratic theory, the empirical anomalies and real-world complications are typically ignored, or treated as random exceptions, by researchers convinced that democracy only ever happens within fixed and bounded territorial settings.
