The attempts to include “the other” in political deliberation frequently overlook Indigenous peoples’ territorial and epistemic dispossession.
Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang challenge the frequent linking of decolonisation with social justice, arguing that academia’s fascination with decolonisation ultimately preserves settler futurity and does little to advance concrete struggles over Indigenous land claims.
Promises to redistribute resources under the banner of social justice do not amount to restoring land, but social justice relies on a thoroughly anthropocentric framework.
They instead propose dismantling settler colonialism through radical practices such as de‑occupation, sustained fugitivity, and labour oriented toward the reproduction of dispossession, which includes refusing to acquire property or to be treated as property.
Mendonça and Asenbaum state that decolonising deliberative democracy requires treating decolonisation as an ongoing process, not a one-off effort to remake theory and practice. Citing the Brazilian Indigenous activist Ailton Krenak, they note that Indigenous perspectives—which attribute value to non-human beings—contest the notion of a single, homogeneous humanity and, like deliberative democracy, emphasise equal participation and dialogue.
Other work has proposed a normative governance model that begins with dialogic encounters bringing together Indigenous communities across the globe who are resisting the inclusion-exclusion dynamics of neoliberal order.
A Citizens’ Assembly might, by integrating Indigenous viewpoints on perspectivism for instance, someday function as a venue where the more-than-human can be given voice. This could be achieved with contemporary tools like AI.
As an example, working with the MOTH project, linguists, biologists, roboticists and AI specialists have documented the lives and communications of Dominica’s sperm whales and found they display linguistic capacities, calling into question ideas that restrict language to humans. Likewise, researchers have shown that honeybee swarms select new homes through “democratic” decision-making in flight—engaging in collective fact-finding, debate, consensus-building, and using an elaborate stop signal to avoid stalemates.
We suggest that a decolonised CA will eventually include the voices of more-than-human beings — not only via contemporary tools, but by enacting non‑modern forms of relationality.
To enable this, Citizens’ Assemblies should adopt formats that are receptive to emotions and rituals, allowing for feeling-thinking rather than limiting engagement to conversations that in many instances may reproduce power relations.