The argument in this book has suggested that democratic theory and practice needs to be reconsidered in order to accommodate the shifting meanings of democracy in contemporary politics and the spaces that have opened up between democratic aspirations and the actual operation of democratic societies. In particular, the tendency to view democratic political organisation as a given whereby everyone understands and agrees upon the types of mechanisms that are required to enable democratic societies to function must be analysed. The first major contention here is that an approach powered by the insights of complexity theory acts to deepen understanding against these forms of simplistic, unsophisticated universalism. The idea of complexity can equip democratic theorists with the wherewithal to challenge these interpretations of democracy that try to protect it from thorough, critical conceptual analysis. The second major contention in this work is that the insights of complexity theory help to shed light not only on the inherent relationship between democracy and conflict – something that most democratic theorists recognise to one degree or another – but also on the increased blurring of this fundamental relationship in contemporary political discourse. An alternative stance, based on the work of political thinkers such as Benjamin, Schmitt and, more recently, Agamben and Žižek, asserts the centrality of this link with particular focus on the deep-seated ways in which discourses of democracy are and have been intertwined with the language and practise of violence. The question that remains, then, is that of the implications of these theories of complexity, conflict and violence for contemporary discourses of democracy.