The road towards an edited volume: GEM-DIAMOND’s book project on dissensus over liberal democracy

As our respective PhD journeys begin to yield results – most of us having returned from last year’s demanding schedule of fieldwork and non-academic secondment – we delved deeply into the writing process for our common book. With the start of 2025, we met twice in Geneva and Paris, to discuss, reflect and share feedbacks on our draft chapters, meant to highlight key findings of our research amongst peers and project partners.

After last year’s Annual Conference was an opportunity for us to present our empirical research strategy, mostly prior to any of us conducting fieldwork, this year begins with the challenging task of reducing the vast amount of observations gathered and making sense of them with our theoretical frameworks in mind.

For our joint book, the additional analytical challenge lies in listening and speaking to one another’s research: When one of us examines the EU’s transatlantic trade, another writes about the reception of environmental regulations in Indonesia, yet another explores religious groups' influence on anti-LGBTQ sentiment, and the last considers the concept of the primacy of EU law, what common theme are we studying?

Many of us assess areas in which the “rules of the game” of liberal democracy – or its international equivalent, the so-called “liberal-international order” (see Börzel and Zürn, 2021), are challenged, rejected or ignored.

In this vein, our respective chapters deal with such dissensus: Serafine’s chapter attempts to understand dissensus around the EU’s enlargement policy, both between member states and EU candidate countries, amidst seemingly arbitrary vetoes, conflictual bilateral relations, and a rejection of the EU’s attempt of transformation by conditionality. Similarly, Adalgisa’s chapter examines how more farmers' protests could be better unpacked if framed as a form of dissensus rather than contestation. As such, these protests often reflect a deeper rupture—not just against specific policies but broader institutional frameworks and decision-making processes. 

The defining “red thread” in our book is the concept of dissensus around liberal democracy, which we engage with in our chapters, from theoretical, legal and empirical perspectives. Following the rich intellectual history of dissensus, shaped by political theorists like Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, we work with the research of Nathalie Brack and Ramona Coman on dissensus as an empirical concept – as developed in many working papers to date.

The baseline assumption is that contemporary political context can no longer be captured by known concepts such as opposition, politicization or contestation, but is qualified as a deep-running conflict in which actors disagree over the sense of liberal democracy, its practices or principles (Coman and Brack, forthcoming). Our book aims to examine how we got there – what brought about the situation of dissensus—before zooming in on different types of actors in the legal, political, social and expert arenas, as well as specific policies and institutions, both within and outside the EU. It will also speak to a publication from GEM-DIAMOND’s sister project, RED-SPINEL, which is working on a Handbook on Dissensus over Liberal Democracy with the EU.

The conferences in Geneva and Paris allowed us to discuss our draft chapters, first amongst ourselves, then with project participants and discussants, in daylong intense debates. Specifically, in Geneva, we worked in a focused workshop format, critically examining not only the coherence of individual chapters but also how they are interconnected to form a cohesive narrative. Paris, in contrast, allowed us to expand the conversation, opening the discussion to professors and fellow researchers within the GEM-DIAMOND project. Their feedback on our work-in-progress chapters was instrumental in sharpening our analyses and strengthening the overall structure of the book.

Although an occasionally brain-frying endeavour, it was a great experience of the academic writing and publishing process: getting questioned and attempting to explain, re-discussing and re-drafting, finding new perspectives in feedback and in the work of peers, and finding the emerging thread that connects our work. Aside from that, even more beautifully, seeing all of our projects be implemented, grow and turn into results, when many of us were full of doubt when we first shared our projects with one another, unsure if they would work out as planned.

A big thank you to our hosts at the University of Geneva and the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne for having us share and present our work there, and to all discussants and colleagues for the constructive and friendly feedback.

Looking forward to our final (sadly) conference next year!