1.

Introduction
Nowadays there is controversy about crisis of Western democracies. Three kinds of
political events have nourished this debate, especially around: electoral results, corruption
and low citizen participation. In terms of electoral results, we find the Brexit in Europe,
voters’ rejection of the peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed of Colombia
(FARC) in Colombia and Trump's electoral victory in the United States. About the second
one, Dilma Rousseff's impeachment for corruption in Brazil is illustrative. Low citizen
participation is a concern for youth educators. This has been documented in Latin America
between 2013 and 2015. Just 24% of young people aged 16-23 were interested in politics,
42% were satisfied with democracy, 20% trusted political parties and 53% said they were
involved in a social organization 1. I will address youth political participation, particularly
one of which young people seems to be interested the most: engagement in social
movements.

The social movement I will focus on is school occupancy by students. During the last five
years, the media have documented in Bogotá at least one case per year. According to
information provided by the Secretary of Education in Bogotá between 2012-2015 a 100
schools were occupied by students (HOW TO CITE THIS ??? XXXXXX). This
phenomenon hasn’t been studied much, probably eclipsed by university student’s
movements such as the seventh voting paper (La Séptima Papeleta) that promoted youth
involvement in the creation of the most recent Colombian Political Constitution (Quintero,
2002, Forero, 2006, Ocampo, 2011). There is also a lack of understanding about learning
possibilities involved in these events (Haste, 2010).

Theoretically speaking, the crisis of democracy has been explained in terms of social
complexity increasing, specifically by Bobbio, Hardt & Negri, and Zolo. These approaches,
that subscribed different complexity understandings, will be briefly described below.
Initially, Bobbio (1985) describes this crisis based on internal conditions of the democratic
State. Later on, Bobbio (1986) talked about the (6) unfulfilled promises of democracy: 1)
the birth of a pluralistic society, 2) political representation, 3) the persistence of oligarchies,
1
Latinobarómetro Corporation, in the youth Observatory for Latin America and the
Caribbean
4) the space to live the politics, 5) the transparency of power, without masks and 6) the
educated citizen. These disappointments occur, according to Bobbio (1986), by the increase
of social complexity. In short, Bobbio (1986) understands complexity in a tripartite way: 1)
a society that requires expert knowledge to be governed; 2) a growth of the bureaucratic
apparatus to attend to the people and; 3) the increase of citizens’ demands to a pachydermic
State. This understanding is centered on the state and its ability to govern.

For Hardt & Negri (Puerta, 2016), the crisis of democracy has two faces: 1) corruption and
inefficiency and 2) the exhaustion of the model against the complex demands of a
globalized society. Initially, this complexity was confronted in modernity with innovations:
universalism, that is, democracy for all through the mechanism of representation, with
which it managed to link the people with the government and at the same time to separate
them. Despite this, the effective development of democracy today has the challenge of
functioning in a different way on a larger scale: the global world (Hardt & Negri, 2004).
This scale difference can be interpreted as a condition of increased complexity (Bar-Yam,
1997).

Zolo (Sardá & Cubas, 1994) is committed to the reconstruction of democratic theory, which
is necessary given: 1) the inadequacy of representative democracy in the so-called
postindustrial societies and 2) the reluctance of authors such as Bobbio to rethink the
democratic theory, despite having evidenced the crisis. Complexity is understood by Zolo
as "the cognitive situation of a subject, an individual or a group, according to which, given
certain conditions, [more or less] complex will be the relations that «builds» and projects
on the environment in the attempt to orientate, that is, ordering, predicting, projecting,
manipulating, and [more or less] complex will ultimately the subject's relation to the
environment itself "(Sarda & Vats, 1994 P292) 2. Zolo (1992) adopts a realistic position,
which privileges the interests at stake in the political arena, rather than the ideal of
universal justice. From that perspective, he denounces that: political parties do not operate
under free pluralistic competition, that power is exercised out of sight, in invisible
oligopolies, and that citizens are under the illusion of multiple options in the mass media,
which makes them fall in apathy and disinformation. Based on this diagnosis, Zolo
proposes a "defensive democratic model that tries to mediate in the increasing political and
economic conflicts, through an improvement in the representation of interests that allows to
present the policy as a balance as precise as possible between freedom and
complexity/security " (Bárcena, 2008 p 236).

I draw on Zolo’s criticism about political theories insufficiency to include complexity

(Zolo, 1992) to say that it is necessary to have a political theory having complexity as a
central feature. Because leaving aside this characteristic leads to a wrong or poor
understanding of democracy. As a consequence, political theories about democracy inspire
political educational programs that neglect complexity as well. In turn, these programs
promote a scarce civic preparation for a reality citizens must face, so it may fuel the
discontenment and lack of tools for citizens’ engagement. It would correspond to the
situation of a traveler who follows a map to reach a destination on foot, with a map that
does not provide key information about the destination, such as: it is in the middle of the
sea, 1.000 km deep. I claim that the most useful theory for this purpose is the emerging
radical democracy, built upon Rancière’s political theory and a complexity science concept
of complexity. Even more, I propose that the emerging radical democracy theory is the best
suited for understanding a complex phenomenon happening at school: the school
occupancy by students.