He Rau Ringa: A Te Tiriti-led democratic imaginary for ethnic communities in Aotearoa

The idea of democracy as a system of governance "of the people, by the people, for the people" (Lincoln, 1863) has been tainted by the skewed structures of representation that systematically shut out minority and subaltern groups from being part of what is constituted as "the people."Most recently, this has been exacerbated by the rise of populism in different parts of the world where democracy has been hijacked by majoritarian groups claiming to represent a collective notion of "the people" fighting against perceived threats from those deemed to be the 'other'.Although state apparatuses have historically neglected the rights of Indigenous and other minority groups, right-wing populist movements use what Dutta (2020) calls "communicative inversions" to strategically label these same apparatuses as being elitist in their bid to marshal public support for building a more "equal" society.Such a notion of equality is often directed at any attempts by the state to address systemic injustices marginalised communities have endured.In right-wing populist narratives, as Schmidtke (2022: 65, 68) points out, "the people" are presented in the "image of a homogenous community" whose "identity and interests need to be protected and nurtured" in the face of a constructed 'other'.Invariably, in this discourse of distorted democracy, the 'other' are the original inhabitants of the land and/or immigrants visibly distinct from the dominant settler colonial arrivals to the land.The challenge of resuscitating democracy is in dismantling settings that allow for processes of 'othering' and instead in creating institutions that recognise that "interdependence and mutual engagement with those who are different is a key to joint action" (Borrows, 2022: xvii).Such institutions can flourish in the context of multiple modes of democracy -Indigenous, representative/state-centred, international, community/