Our Democracy Speakers’ Corner is an exciting new Democracy Lighthouse initiative. It’s a space designed to encourage dialogue, disagreement and informed reflection and commentary about democracy and its future. Democracy Speakers’ Corner aims to bring together activists, scholars, policymakers, and citizen voices to share different experiences and competing views about the serious challenges and openings confronting democracy everywhere on our planet. We encourage our visitors to add spice and life to the platform by making written, audio, or visual contributions united by a common commitment to democratic values, intellectual seriousness, respectful exchanges and deeply felt concerns about the tough and turbulent times through which our world is passing.
We intend Democracy Speakers’ Corner to be a small but significant contribution to the spirit of democracy. In the long history of democratic politics, saying the unsayable, exposing secrets and silences, making public things of public importance have always been fundamental principles. Public assemblies of citizens in ancient Syria-Mesopotamia and Greece, speeches about morals delivered from inside chapels, synagogues and mosques, constitutional conventions, trade union strikes, and occupations of public squares by angry and disaffected citizens are among the best-known practical examples of these principles. To the list must be added speakers’ corners, places where in the past crowds gathered to hear speakers rant and rave about matters of the day – carnivalesque spaces where, in the presence of others, people put their bodies and voices on the line, praised or mocked and walloped the rich and powerful, denounced devils, recommended different ways of thinking and called for radical changes in the way we dwell on this small planet we call home.
Speakers’ corners so named are a mid-nineteenth century invention that has survived into our times. The most famous case is the Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner located a stone’s throw from London’s Marble Arch. But there have been many other less well-known experiments which embraced the name: the Speakers’ Corner in Singapore’s Hong Lim Park, Woodford Square (known locally as the ‘people’s parliament’) in Trinidad and Tobago’s Port of Spain, and the oval-shaped Sanam Luang in the heart of old Bangkok, for instance. And there are the gli angoli degli oratori in Tuscany, Rome and Venice, the Spreeksteen in Amsterdam, and many speakers’ corner experiments in Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia.
Despite police harassment and court bans, the practice of speakers’ corners has gone global and even survived the transition from an age of newspapers, pamphlets, books, soapboxes, radio and television to an era of digitally networked, multi-media communications. In our age of reels, memes, tweets and Reddit- and Substack-style blogs, speakers’ corners live on in more quarrelsome, decentred and disembodied multi-media forms. More platforms aren’t of course synonymous with more informed debate, wise judgments or common agreements. But, like the speakers’ corners of yesteryear, the new speakers’ corners spring up whenever people are drawn together by matters of common concern. They are assemblages of ironists and comics, the wondrous and the worried, the frustrated and the furious. As we hope to show by example in our new initiative, speakers’ corners are lively gatherings of people who care about the ways of our world, who ask tough questions and who daringly make the case for reimagining and defending democracy because they suspect that far too many of the wealthy and powerful leaders in charge of our planet are the new horsemen of a frightening apocalypse.
You can contribute to the Speakers’ Corner by clicking HERE.
