 Is it democratic to disqualify a popular candidate from the ballot? That a popular candidate could be disqualified from running and removed from the ballot might, at first glance, seem at odds with the very idea of democracy. For that reason, despite his evident role in instigating an insurrection, many Republican senators demurred and chose not to impeach former President Donald J. Trump on 13 January 2021. There was no need, they thought. The American voters had already passed judgment. Trump would now fade away. Three years later, with Trump still fully in control of the Republican Party and poised to regain the Presidency, the US Supreme Court decided per curiam that Courts cannot declare a candidate ineligible for public office under the “insurrection clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s scheduled hearing of Trump’s executive immunity claim seems intended to guarantee that the federal January 6 case will occur too late to influence or interfere with the 2024 US Presidential Election. In these and other cases, we can see that, despite the existence of constitutional mechanisms to disqualify antidemocrats from obtaining power, elected representatives, judges, and other officials are reluctant to use them. At first glance, there seems to be something principled about their reluctance: what is democracy if not an equal chance to see one’s preferred candidate elected into public office; and what are political rights if not the right to choose one’s values freely, even if that choice may seem “wrong” to others? As long as someone adheres to the legal democratic procedures in effect for pursuing their goals, are their views not as valid as anyone else’s? Democracy seems to mean that every member should have their interests and values considered equally, through value-neutral majoritarian procedures. Everything should in principle be “on the agenda” when it comes to these procedures, to ensure that the electorate holds final authority over decision-making. A measure like political disqualification seems to undermine the essence of democratic equal chance—even when used to stop an unambiguous enemy of democracy. So many today, across the political spectrum, express reservations about using such measures, arguing that the decision can only be left to voters to decide. That view is mistaken, however. Elected and appointed leaders, not to mention democratic citizens, can be more confident in their defence of democracy. Constitutional mechanisms that limit value-neutral procedures, including disqualification, can be consistent with our most fundamental ideals of democracy. The near collapse of democracy during the interwar period provides some insight into why that may be. It highlighted two related problems with conceiving of democracy merely as a value-neutral procedure. First, although value-neutral procedures are indeed important to democracy, they are insufficient. Liberal constitutionalism—human rights, the separation of powers, and the rule of law—is as essential. Without it, majority or even supermajority rule can become tyrannical and as oppressive as a dictatorship. So-called “illiberal democracy” is a contradiction in terms. A state must also guarantee basic rights, separate and balance its powers, and adhere to the rule of law to be considered a legitimate democracy. Second, the interwar period exposed the limits of traditional methods of constitutional entrenchment, such as supermajoritarian thresholds. Those methods assume most citizens are fundamentally committed to democracy. That assumption proved wrong. Many citizens are at best weakly committed to democratic principles. Some are illiberal and antidemocratic. Others prioritize partisan interests over democratic principles. Antidemocrats can exploit a complacent or self-interested majority and turn democracy’s value-neutral procedures against its constitutional essentials, leading to democratic suicide. Post-war constitutions, such as the German Basic Law, were designed with that historical lesson in mind. Among other things, they adopted what is known as “militant democracy” to defend themselves. A militant democracy is a democracy that adopts stronger forms of constitutional entrenchment, in particular explicit unamendability of basic rights, procedures to disqualify parties and candidates, and a more robust role for constitutional courts to check legislative and executive abuses of power, all to prevent democracy’s legal revolution. Militant measures limit political rights to protect democratic constitutional essentials against legal yet illegitimate changes. Systematically demonstrating an intent to use one’s political rights to overturn democratic constitutional essentials may justify disqualification: a party becomes a candidate for disqualification if its internal structure is antidemocratic or if it endorses abrogating or derogating human rights; an individual becomes a candidate for disqualification if he knowingly assists an insurrection and in so doing violates his oath of public office. Democrats can be confident in pursuing disqualification in these circumstances. Although some may believe disqualification pre-empts a legitimate democratic choice, the truth is that disqualification may secure the possibility for democratic choosing to happen in the first place. Of course, it would be better to simply defeat antidemocrats at the ballot box. Yet history shows this does not always work. Democratic backsliding in countries like Hungary and India underscores the inadequacy of a passive defence of democracy. According to Freedom House, 2024 marked the eighteenth consecutive year that democracy declined worldwide. If democrats will not act to defend democracy, then who will? One lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic is that states adopting multiple levels of defence fared best, notably New Zealand and South Korea. The reason is clear: every defensive measure has inherent weaknesses and blind spots. Relying on a single measure dramatically increases the risk of a threat breaking through, no matter how robust that measure is. Conversely, the layering and networking of different defence mechanisms generates a cumulative effect, significantly reducing the risk of a public health disaster. Just as a single measure is inadequate in public health, democracy’s self-defence also requires a layered approach. Key strategies include promoting civic education in democratic values and tackling inequality through economic redistribution and strengthened social safety nets. However, it is militant democracy alone that addresses the problem of antidemocrats using legal revolutionary methods to subvert democracy. This recognition is reflected in the design of many post-war constitutions, which were written with the threat of legalistic antidemocrats in mind. Militant measures work best when executed in a timely and decisive manner, as soon as a party or candidate reveals its true colours. It is far easier to disqualify a marginal antidemocratic party—as West Germany did in 1952 and 1956—than a popular one. However, militant measures should be used in any case, whether a party is popular or not. It is far better to take action against antidemocrats, even if doing so is countermajoritarian, than it is to passively stand by, as if democratic suicide were democratically kosher. In the end, what matters is the recognition that democracy extends beyond value-neutral majoritarian procedures. Human rights, the separation of powers, and the rule of law are the bedrock of any functioning democratic society. Today, the phenomena of democratic backsliding and “illiberal democracy” highlight the urgency of learning from democracy’s history. Militant democracy, including its disqualification mechanisms, is vital for countering the legal revolution of our democratic constitutional essentials and preventing democracy’s self-cannibalization. While their deployment must be judicious, measures of militant democracy are both legitimate and indispensable for guaranteeing democracy’s survival. Featured image by Cyrus Crossan via Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 The rising power paradigm and India’s 2024 general elections India, the world’s largest democracy, is holding its national elections over a six-week period starting 19 April. The elections to the 543-member lower house of the parliament (Lok Sabha) with an electorate, numbering 968 million eligible voters, assumes critical importance as India is going through both internal and external changes that are heavily linked to its rising power aspirations and achievements. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been campaigning on the claim that under his leadership, India’s global status has improved substantially and that he is determined to make India a great power and developed country by 2047, the centenary year of independence. The growing Hindu middle class seems to agree. According to a February 2023 Pew survey, Modi had a 79% favorable approval rating. More interestingly, some 85% of Indians surveyed by Pew think a strong authoritarian leader or military rule is preferable to multi-party electoral democracy, the highest for any country surveyed. Since its economic liberalization in 1991, in terms of comprehensive national power, including both hard and soft power markers, India has made substantial progress—in some areas more than in others—even though it still lags behind China in many indicators of material power and social welfare. The critical factor is the steady economic growth rate ranging from 6 to 8% over the past three decades. The $4 trillion economy, which recently overtook previous colonial ruler Britain to reach the fifth position in the world, is poised to become number three by 2030. The tactical and strategic advantages India has made under somewhat favorable geopolitical circumstances are many, but these could easily erode if its soft power foundations, especially democracy, secularism, and federalism, decline even further. The $4 trillion economy, which recently overtook previous colonial ruler Britain to reach the fifth position in the world, is poised to become number three by 2030. The implications of the elections to India’s rise as an inclusive democratic state is potentially far reaching. If the BJP wins a two-thirds majority, concerns are heightened that it would amend the Indian constitution, altering its core principles of liberal democracy and secularism and declare India a majoritarian Hindu state. India’s status advancement in recent years has benefitted the ruling establishment. Modi’s achievements are built on the foundations laid by the previous Congress Party-led governments of Prime Ministers P.V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh. India’s 2005 rapprochement with the US and its opening to the world, especially to East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, occurred during that period. It was Rao and his Finance Minister Singh who opened the Indian economy to the world through their wide-ranging economic reforms in 1991. The economic growth was also very robust during much of Singh’s tenure. Many of the social programs were started during that period, but Modi has improved on their delivery by introducing direct transfer and also adding new welfare programs guaranteeing the poor subsided rations and cooking gas. Some 300 million Indians were lifted out of extreme poverty during Singh’s term in office alone, and a similar number may have come out during BJP rule. Yet India still hosts some 12% of its 1.4 billion population below the poverty line (considered as $2 a day) while 84% have an income less than $7 a day. If the BJP wins a two-thirds majority, concerns are heightened that it would amend the Indian constitution, altering its core principles of liberal democracy and secularism and declare India a majoritarian Hindu state. The previous Congress regime’s inability to cash in on their achievements for electoral gains is in direct contrast to Modi’s success in presenting a different image to the public on India’s economic and military achievements and general international status advancement. Skillful propaganda, especially using social media, has enabled this. India’s swing power role in the Indo-Pacific, in terms of balancing China’s rise and aggressive behavior, has helped India’s geopolitical prominence and Modi has astutely used it for his own electoral successes. He has used contentious religious nationalism, including the building of a temple in Ayodhya over a destroyed Muslim mosque, repealing the Article 370 of the Constitution which gave Jammu and Kashmir special autonomous status, and adding programs to allow citizenship to displaced minorities (excluding Muslims) from neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh, to solidify his support among ardent Hindu-nationalist groups. The 18 million-strong Indian diaspora contains many pro-Hindu groups that have helped Modi’s efforts by offering financial and moral support. Although the rising power claim may have helped Modi’s possible third term re-election, there is another side to this story. Some of the BJP government’s internal policies may, in the long-run, undercut the status achievement by putting its legitimacy and sustainability in question. The number one challenge is the democratic backslide that has been happening under the BJP rule. Today India is ranked at 66 as a ‘partly free country’ by Freedom House, and the rating agency V-Dem recently demoted India as an ‘electoral autocracy.’ A number of measures curtailing freedom of expression and other essential democratic rights have occurred under Modi, denting India’s democratic credentials, one of its key soft power assets. Similarly, secularism, another soft power marker of India since independence, has been reduced as there is a direct effort to assert the Hindu majoritarianism as visualized by the BJP and its militant ideological arm, the Rastriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS). The democratic backsliding presages considerable difficulties to legitimizing India’s status as a liberal democratic rising power. The major challenges to freedom of expression, the party’s increasing ideological control of India’s judiciary, and the attacks on minority rights, as well as harassment an arrest of opposition leaders using governmental agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate, all portend the emergence of an illiberal state even when elections are held periodically. While Hindutva (Hindu-ness) aimed at the hegemony of Hinduism over all other religious groups has increasing sympathy among the Hindu electorate and sections of the diaspora, it is still to obtain any international traction as an attractive ideology or model for political order. It is yet to offer a coherent and convincing agenda for the emerging world order. The father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, used Hindu and Buddhist religious ideas such as Ahimsa (non-violence), among others, to develop his model of non-violent struggle. Can Modi in his third term make a conscious effort to develop India as an inclusive, democratic state, and bring peaceful and tolerant aspects of Hinduism to the fore? Or will Indian democratic exceptionalism evolve into an entrenched populist majoritarian system with all its attendant challenges for democratic freedoms, even while India makes substantial material progress? The simultaneous democratic backsliding in many countries, including the US and Europe, does not help India’s prospects in this regard. India may still receive a higher geopolitical position (in the context of China’s rise) and the steady economic growth that would allow it to emerge as a key destination for trade and foreign investment, and a source of technically qualified workforce and migrants for the next two decades or more. India’s greater inclusion in global governance is needed for reasons of equity, efforts at solving many collective action problems, and greater effectiveness of international institutions. The peaceful accommodation of India will alter the historical patterns of rise and fall of great powers through war. Whether it will be a peaceful process internally is yet to be determined. The forthcoming elections will establish India’s trajectory in a colossal way both for its domestic politics and foreign relations. Feature image by Graphic Gears on Unsplash, public domain OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 The origins of the war in Ukraine [timeline] The fall of the Soviet Union meant independence for Ukraine, and radically altered the shape and power structures of Eastern Europe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the culmination of a number of growing fissures and collisions in the region—between Russia and Ukraine, but also between Europe and Russia, and Russia and the United States. Michael Kimmage, a historian and former diplomat who served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State where he handled the Russia/Ukraine portfolio, looks at the origins of this conflict dating back to 24 August 1991. Feature image by Max Kukurudziak via Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Analysis of the Nuclear Risk Reduction Agenda Nuclear risk analysis will not save usIn a context of intensifying great power competition and deep divergences of view between nuclear and non-nuclear powers on the urgency of nuclear abolition, ‘nuclear risk reduction’ has gained renewed attention as a pragmatic framework for managing and reducing nuclear dangers. The pitch is simple. With more fundamental policy changes either undesirable or out of reach, government officials, parliamentarians, and civil society actors invested in nuclear arms control and disarmament should focus their efforts on humanity’s ‘shared interest’ in curtailing the risk of nuclear weapon use. This means collectively identifying, analysing, and sequestering so-called nuclear risk scenarios. Centring the nuclear policy conversation on the risk of use, so goes the argument, promises to slash political polarisation between nuclear and non-nuclear powers, increase trust between states, and, most fundamentally, help manage or gradually depress nuclear dangers—perhaps even to the point of a ‘permanent escape’ from nuclear jeopardy. There is broad support among experts and officials, including many supporters of abolition, for devoting time and resources to discussing nuclear risk and risk reduction measures across domestic, bilateral, and multilateral political forums. In a new article for International Affairs, we interrogate the assumptions underpinning the line of thinking set out above and conclude that the diplomatic orientation variously referred to as the nuclear risk reduction ‘framework’, ‘template’, ‘agenda’, or ‘approach’ offers a false promise for those seeking durable, shared solutions to the nuclear predicament. To be clear, our gripe in this article is not with specific diplomatic measures or attempts at progressively reducing the salience of nuclear weapons in world politics. We do not mean to suggest that limited technical or diplomatic measures—be it the fitting of electronic locks on warheads, maintenance of systems for crisis communications, or doctrinal changes—cannot be worthwhile or even risk reducing in an objective sense. Instead, our contention is that these measures are not categorically derivable from risk analysis, that nuclear risks and deterrence cannot be reliably ‘managed’ over the long term, and that risk analysis offers a poor overarching framework for those eager to advance nuclear devaluing and disarmament. Advocates of the latter, we suggest, would be better off anchoring their demands either in explicit normative commitments or a general ethic of restraint. We see three big problems for the risk reduction agenda. The first is that meaningful risk analysis requires access to a level of knowledge and foresight that is quite simply unattainable in the secretive and often contingent world of nuclear politics—a world where even a single error could prove disastrous. Epistemic errors and knowledge gaps could end up leading policymakers down dangerous paths. A second challenge is that risk thinking often encourages an unduly instrumental view of complex techno-political systems, inviting potentially catastrophic overconfidence. As we show in the article, central luminaries of the risk reduction school have systematically underestimated the chances of disaster, placing outsized faith in leaders’ ability to maintain control in difficult situations. The third and final problem we identify is that the risk reduction framework is too indeterminate to steer diplomatic action. As a result, discussions of nuclear risk can easily be coopted, and nuclear-armed leaders cannot be held accountable for their actions one way or another. Tellingly, the risk reduction agenda has lent itself to everything from calls for deep nuclear stockpile reductions to demands for new nuclear weapons acquisitions and a resumption of explosive nuclear testing. And as long as nuclear risks remain effectively unmeasurable, risk analysis cannot adjudicate these disagreements. What’s more, and contrary to what its proponents often claim, the risk reduction agenda is severely circumscribed by the putative requirements of nuclear deterrence. Deterrence practices, after all, are necessarily ‘risky’ as the credibility of nuclear deterrence, in particular extended nuclear deterrence, depends on ‘threats that leave something to chance’. Proponents of the nuclear risk reduction agenda would be right to point out that the current international security environment does not look particularly conducive to radical nuclear policy changes. Implementing common-sense measures of restraint would be better than doing nothing, they might argue. We do not disagree. Our objection is that the radical uncertainty that defines the nuclear world renders ‘risk reduction’ a poor overarching frame for diplomatic action; the discourse of risk, we suggest, does not offer advantageous terrain for advocates of change. If what proponents of nuclear risk reduction really want to do is to promote nuclear de-alerting, new or improved communication hotlines, ‘deterrence only’ postures, risk reduction centres, or the adoption of no-first use policies, they should just do that and not invite a discussion about unmeasurable risks that can easily be coopted by those eager to do the opposite. The search for a consensus-based, ‘pragmatic’ approach to nuclear arms control and disarmament—a nuclear politics without politics—is in vain. Feature image by Kilian Karger via Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 The third sister: beauty, and why the aesthetic matters In the current critical/political atmosphere, the “aesthetic” has come to be regarded as the province of dandies and their descendants, not to do with the enormous difficulties of the here and now. What work, if any, as the sky threatens to collapse over our head, might the aesthetic do to help us out of this mess? Can one make the case that the aesthetic is not peripheral to all that matters in this tumultuous, difficult, and utilitarian world, but that it always has been and is still an urgently valuable element in it? We have seen, particularly with the crisis of COVID—which closed cinemas, theaters, concert halls, and museums—how immediately and pressingly society manifested a deep need for the arts. They proved essential to the psychological wellbeing of millions of people, and their absence from public life had economic impact as well. People sought and found new ways to perform, to hear, to see those elements of social life, literature, film, theater, music, graphic art, for which they are now not eager to pay for in the education of their children. On the one hand, in both England and America, the humanities, with their crucial aesthetic components in the arts, are regularly defunded for the sake of more obviously utilitarian studies. On the other hand, within the humanities themselves, the aesthetic components of the arts are being increasingly ignored in favor of more apparently urgent political problems. As Ankhi Mukherjee puts it, in much criticism “political…stands for literature that is not beautiful.” The Question of the Aesthetic argues that the aesthetic should be seen as a mode of knowledge—not incompatible with such currently inflammable issues as imperialism, or race, or gender, but as an important means to understanding them. The peculiar value knowledge the aesthetic generates is not discursive and generalizing but singular, emotive, and humanizing. Knowledge of the aesthetic helps pose critical questions that disciplines and discourses inattentive to problems like form or “beauty” cannot. The aesthetic, as Herbert Tucker puts it, “can provide a salutary check on the rush to relevance in contemporary humanities study, which will labor to better effect, even in service to causes that summon it most urgently, as it redoubles attention to the resources of artistic form, and the unexpected truth that beauty harbors.” The Question of the Aesthetic attempts to address this double difficulty—the idea that the aesthetic is peripheral to the urgencies of human life, and the idea that attention to it deflects attention from the issues that really matter. Although the conventional understanding of evolutionary development is that all species change as a result of fundamentally utilitarian pressures, a strong case can be made that the aesthetic sometimes trumps the utilitarian. Richard Prum argues that aesthetic preference, the desirability of the beautiful, has played a crucial evolutionary role, as on the model of Darwin’s sexual selection: new species have often emerged out of the preference of one sex for beauty in the other, as evidenced by the astonishing elaboration of the peacock’s wings. But while this argument should be taken as one piece of evidence that the aesthetic is not only compatible with the fundamental needs of human life, but in many cases is a critical element in satisfying those needs, it should be supplemented with broader understanding. With their attention to the facts of history, to the language in which that history is embodied, to the very materials of art and the cultural and political and economic conflicts that mark the lives of everyone, art engages with the felt experience of the facts. Through aesthetic representation, unattended facts speak, or can speak, across cultures, opening to fresh understandings of the other. It is not by chance that various forms of art—in music, poetry, fiction, film—become the media through which human experience, in conflicts, oppression, liberation, and simple suffering or simple joy, are most forcefully articulated. The power of critique of such representation is critical to whatever future the world can work out for itself. The beautiful—the traditional subject of aesthetics—should be an unembarrassed sister of knowledge and ethics, and a vital condition for that intellectual and moral work. “The humanities,” concludes Helen Small, “have a special interest in the experiences of beauty…as they alter the quality of our perception and understanding of the world—recognizing that what moves us is at once private and shared, conventionally determined and constantly subject to change. …It is in the process of acknowledging, discussing, debating, disputing aesthetic experience…that much of our social and political experience takes place. Critical to that thinking is the power aesthetic experience affords us to apprehend the idea of agency through language, and thus be in a position to respond better to the reality of injustice.” Featured image: Ayush Tiwari on Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
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