ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises the analyses of six country case studies’ empirically rich and diverse set of materials and the emerging themes to answer the two central questions of the book: (1) How do citizens in states that lack political freedom and autonomy partake in political participation? (2) What are contributing factors to political desires and deliberations, and how might they engender (or limit) political agency and democratic capability for people living in conditions of democratic duress? Although markedly different in contexts, data sources, and analytical entry points, these case studies highlight the reciprocal relationships between the state and the society, channelled through specific narratives to normalise a regime of truth and legitimise a structure for social identification. Practices of political participation are dependent on political desires, values, and goals that emanate from such social relations – therefore placing political actors as normative subjects within social structures rather than transcendental subjects with unbound freedom. The chapter argues that to better understand political agency for democratic capability in authoritarian contexts, which is also helpful to see how they may work in democratic settings, we have to interrogate the conditions and conditionings of these social structures and how they might inform different forms of political ambitions and actions, while at the same time, locating political actors’ responsiveness to the power relations in certain social practices. The chapter concludes the book by discussing the usefulness of the three’domain framework in guiding the analyses of the case studies, and for further research on political participation in different contexts.
