Rethinking Democracy beyond its Borders. A Conference with Seyla Benhabib (Columbia University in the City of New York) 

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Dipartimento di Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale, Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo, 20126 Milano · Building U7, 3rd Floor, Aula Pagani, 8-9 June 2026.

This conference critically engages with the arguments advanced in Seyla Benhabib’s  At the Margins of the Modern State, which interrogates the tensions between universalism and exclusion in contemporary political and legal orders. In a global context marked by war, democratic backsliding, and the erosion of international norms, universalism can no longer be understood as either uncontested or complete. The challenge today is to reconstruct democratic and cosmopolitan norms under conditions of pluralism, asymmetry, and historical injustice.The conference is organized around two central questions:-  Can democracy be normatively and institutionally reconstructed in an age of polycrisis, fractured sovereignty, and the transformation of the public sphere?–  Under what conditions is democracy still possible today?