Hesitant democracy: Equality, inequality and the time of politics

This paper develops the idea of hesitant democracy, a position that endeavours to stay true to the political spirit of universal equality while being mindful of the potential compromises it imposes on our ethical obligations. Drawing inspiration from the Obama administration's response to the January revolutions in Egypt, and specifically the administration's call for an ‘orderly transition’, it argues that democracy is fundamentally compromised by the aporatic presence of the bad neighbour: the other that does not recognise my right to exist. The aim of this paper is to reveal how democracy works to manage the bad neighbour through a regime of time. While much has been written about democracy's mechanisms for managing and apportioning power, taking a geographical perspective allows us to see such arrangements as a spatial-temporal regime; a system of procedures, processes and protocols that disrupt temporal linearity