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T he point of departure in this book is that the current stagnation of democracy in the postcolonial world is due to the depoliticisation of important public issues and interests. Major public concerns have become matters of technocratic governance or privatised to the market as well as communal, patronage, and privileged citizens' networks. The introductory chapter argues that the root-cause is flawed representation: flawed representation emanating from both elitist institution building and fragmented citizen participation. Hence, a case is made for the need to rethink popular representation and develop methods that are more democratic. An analytical framework is outlined to that end. This framework draws on the insights from the subsequent chapters, in the context of the wider discourse. These chapters in turn focus on critical theoretical issues and empirical experiences in comparative perspective. 1 Depoliticisation and the Primacy of Representation The state of democracy in the Global South is marked by a striking paradox: although liberal democracy has attained an ideologically hegemonic position through several so-called waves of democracy, 2 the qualities of such democracies are increasingly called into question. The few 'old' democracies in the Global South, like India and Sri Lanka, are weakened. 3 They emerged in the struggle for state sovereignty and citizenship against colonialism and feudal-like subordination of people. The basic

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A lthough it is true that the world-renowned postcolonial attempts at popular representation in Indonesia, the Indian state of Kerala, and the Philippines suffered from the subordination of democratisation to the cold war, anti-imperialism, and top-down politics, 1 the setbacks and new contradictions generated democracy-oriented groups against statism, violence, clientelism, and coercive accumulation of capital for civil rights and public action on concrete issues. 2 In Manila in 1986, a peaceful people-power movement removed Marcos in spite of Maoist predictions that nothing but armed revolution would do. Indonesia, a few years later, witnessed the growing movement against Suharto. In Kerala, participatory politics took a similar direction although in different form with social, environmental, and educational activists initiating campaigns for literacy, group-farming, and alternative development based on participatory mapping of local resources. 3 A common challenge in each case lay in how to build cooperation between the rights-bearing middle-class civil society activists and broader groups facing marginalisation, exclusion, and rights deprivation; how to build alliances uniting quite disparate groups across social and physical spaces; and how to give such alliances an organised political base in

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