This open access book examines deliberative and anti-deliberative practices and ideals and how they fare in post-conflict contexts marked by democratic backsliding. It compares how deliberation and anti-deliberation unfold to identify constructive and destructive discursive engagement's spaces, mechanisms, and features. The authors contend that there is as much to learn from how speakers enact good quality deliberation as there is from how they depart from it. These departures and their implications for deliberators and their polities have not been examined to date.

This edited collection is useful to scholars of deliberation and public communication with its novel comparative perspective on fulfilment and violation of deliberative standards, to civil society and policy-makers with its insights into how to improve deliberative culture, and to international peace-building and democracy-promotion organisations and activists with its pointers as to how to prop democratisation and halt democratic backsliding.

Ivor Sokolić is Lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Hertfordshire and Visiting Fellow at the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.

Denisa Kostovicova is Professor of global politics at the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.

Irena Fiket is Senior Research Fellow and Academic Coordinator of the Laboratory for Active Citizenship and Democratic Innovations at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Serbia.