Book Review: Unpacking Participatory Democracy – From Practice to Theory (Edited by Aruna Roy and Suchi Pande)
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Team Kitaab reviews Unpacking Participatory Democracy – From Practice to Theory, edited by Aruna Roy and Suchi Pande (Orient Blackswan, 2025).
If the earlier companion volume moved from ideas toward lived experience, Unpacking Participatory Democracy – From Practice to Theory reverses the arc with deliberate care. Edited once again by Aruna Roy and Suchi Pande, the book gathers decades of democratic practice and slowly distils them into reflection, analysis, and political philosophy. What emerges is not a retreat into abstraction, but a deepening of understanding—a patient effort to ask what the struggles on the ground have taught us about democracy itself.
At its heart, the volume carries a quiet but urgent claim: theory must answer to experience. If democracy is faltering across the globe—hollowed out by centralised power, rising statelessness, shrinking civic space, and the corrosion of accountability—then our frameworks for understanding democracy must also be re-examined. This collection treats practice not as anecdotal evidence but as a source of knowledge. Villages, unions, collectives, social audits, protests, and negotiations become sites of theory-making.
Read Team Kitaab’s review of the earlier volume: Unpacking Participatory Democracy – From Theory to Practice
