In this article, I argue that groups are reluctant to relinquish enemy dynamics due to the benefits and moral power that enemyship generates. Through a case study of responses to Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, I propose that Eichmann's trial created the perception of group cohesion, control of societal risks, enhanced status and purpose, and reduced culpability. However, I propose that this is an illusion that obfuscates systemic causes of conflict, erases victims' agency, absolves bystanders' responsibility, and reduces tolerance for internal dissent. Accepting these illusions can create new problems, turning the social functions of enemies into societal dysfunctions.
This article advances the concept of tropical narcissism as a culturally embedded variant of political narcissism through an analysis of executive leadership in contemporary Colombia. Focusing on the presidency of Gustavo Petro, it examines how narcissistic leadership is legitimized through symbolic narratives, literary imaginaries, and regional discourses. Using thematic and content discourse analysis in ATLAS.ti on presidential speeches and X posts, the study evaluates four analytical categories: political delirium, regional nationalism, historical references, and garciamarquiano symbolism. The findings reveal a pattern of symbolic personalization in which executive self-projection merges with national destiny, exposing tensions between narrative ambition and governing capacity.
This article questions the analytical and empirical dominance of the term 'resistance' and contends that the term may at times obscure the proactive, enduring and often existential dimensions of political action which might be better captured by the term 'struggle'. To this end, a 'folksonomic' approach is proposed in place of the more common top-down, taxonomic knowledge production, prioritizing instead the vocabularies and imaginaries of political actors themselves. Drawing on a combination of entanglement, anarchiving and collective biography together offers a framework for rethinking how scholars engage with both people's political practices and lived experiences.
Globalization and International Relations are closely connected as both deal with complex interactions and power dynamics. Economic competition is nothing new, but actors also compete for prestige and reputation, the domain of soft power. How do globalization and soft power intersect and interact? The answer is often implicit. This paper argues that soft power 'runs on' globalization's connectivity channels, such as people-to-people interactions, and digital and physical infrastructure, enabling or stifling dynamics of attraction. It aims to clarify how tightly connected globalization is to patterns of attraction and influence, and the significance of mastering but also damaging these interactions.
As environmentalists work to implement local sustainability policies, what forces shape advocacy outcomes? Here I discuss policymaker responses to environmental organizing in a mid-size North American city. Ethnographic research reveals how city governments invoke policy paradoxes - policies designed to invite ambiguous and contradictory interpretations-that effectively deflect and demobilize the power potential of movements. Where social movements research has long emphasized necessary and favorable mechanisms of movement power, I explain how strategic agreement with movement ideals becomes institutionalized. I describe how 'policy guardrailing' -segregated pathways for new policies that protect established practices -fosters allusions, illusions, and delusions of civic power.
Honneth's critical theory of recognition divides social and political theorists. Advocates of Honneth's approach stress its sophisticated normative foundations, its ease of operationalizability and its intuitive applicability to contemporary socio-political struggles. Honneth's approach is popular with empirical researchers and is deployed widely. Yet, criticisms of Honneth's theory have been mounting. In this paper, I expand on these criticisms. I advance eight arguments which can be made against Honneth's critical theory of recognition. I argue that the combined power of these criticisms is such that critical theorists should cease attempts to reform Honneth's perspective and should instead develop divergent social-theoretical foundations.
This paper examines the rise of anti-woke politics through a Gramscian analysis of how right-wing actors use networks, state power, and ideological discourse to secure coerced consent and reshape public education. By targeting critical perspectives of systemic inequality, anti-woke policies, such as Florida's HB 7 and SB 266, work to entrench existing hierarchies while suppressing subaltern political agency. The paper outlines the following principles for counter-hegemonic resistance: developing critical consciousness, building cross-group coalitions, and strategically reframing political demands. These strategies illuminate how subaltern communities can contest an evolving reactionary project seeking to preserve forms of domination across U.S. institutions.
Democracy has stagnated worldwide, and incumbents in competitive authoritarian systems are using state authority to perpetuate their hold on power. We examine post-communist competitive authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe, using Albania as a key example, of how contemporary competitive authoritarian regimes combine informally obtained information and public resources to extend their tenure. On the eve of the 2021 national Albanian election, an extensive list of so-called 'Patronazhists' leaked from the incumbent Socialist Party offices. The document showed a highly structured system of information gathering, accompanied by state resource allocation for votes, and a highly partisan public administration.
Globally, the care sector faces precarious working conditions and workforce shortages, prompting the emergence of numerous empowerment projects. To explore the power-related tensions and politics of empowerment, this study draws on ethnographic research investigating a nurse empowerment movement in the Netherlands. We build on a framework distinguishing 'power-over, to and with', and extend this debate by incorporating views of power that see it as both three-dimensional as well as a matter of processes and flows through circuits of power. This integrated framework enables analysis of the daily, multidimensional and recursive operation of coercive and facilitative power during power transitions.
This paper explores the understudied relationship between political and moral agency in actor-network theory (ANT). ANT developed a post-humanist theory of political agency by reinterpreting contract theory through a post-structuralist semiotic lens, but marginalized concerns over moral agency as humanistic impositions. However, ANT scholars ultimately struggled to imagine a future for democratic politics. Pragmatist philosophy offers solutions that will recouple political and moral agency without sacrificing many of the insightful contributions of material semiotics. While pragmatism requires us to moderate ANT's commitment to post-humanism, it offers some advantages to navigating the complex democratic problems of our 'post-truth' political order.
This paper reviews selected key perspectives on the concept of 'power' from the 1950 s to the present, highlighting overlooked aspects in critical interpretations that have impacted on the term's reduction and banalization in academic discussions. Building on this review, and drawing on more recent texts, it advocates for a definition that highlights power's heuristic utility in anthropological research, presenting power as contextual, dynamic, multilayered and contradictory forces shaping actions that offer insights into how individuals/networks navigate and re-contextualize constraints, limitations and uncertainties.
The article discusses how power is conceptualized via the vertical metaphor. Within it, people's roles and positions are described in terms of a spatial structure, in which being higher or lower means having more or less power or prestige. To show its use, I analyze a dataset of floor debates in national parliaments. The results show that this metaphor is used in three instances: social class, civilization, and structures of governance. In conclusion, the article suggests that we treat power also as a topic rather than only as an analytic resource.
Both 'violence' and 'nonviolence' are contested terms. Naming 'violence' or 'nonviolence' is often central to what resistance struggles are about. Such contestations are therefore inevitably inherently political and normative, never just scientific or theoretical. Four areas of contestation are discussed: the variety of phenomena labelled 'violence'; the importance of public perceptions for 'nonviolent' resistance; the extent to which even 'nonviolent' struggles seek to cause discomfort that can be received as 'violent'; and the way 'nonviolence' can become entangled in the (re)production of 'violence'. Seeking to settle definitions is therefore a Sisyphean task, even though these labels are important to resistance.
Drawing on a corpus of books by conservative, right-wing or reactionary authors - together termed 'counter-critics' - this article examines how they represent their opponents' ideas as 'tyranny', as 'authoritarian' or even 'totalitarian'. Rather than offering a theoretical account of 'power', the approach here follows a Foucauldian approach to 'problematisation', examining how 'power' is represented in discourse. Beyond tracing how counter-critics denounce their opponents as 'tyrannical', what emerges here is how a special power is attributed to words and ideas, both to enchant people with ideology and to dispel such delusions. Finally, this article offers reflexive considerations concerning the practice of critique.
While soft power continues to be an influential idea in public diplomacy, the complex realities of a multi-polar world necessitate an examination not just of how nations gain soft power, but also how they lose it. How does a country traverse the spectrum of credibility gain and loss? How can the ontology of this progression be captured into a relevant epistemology? Taking an interdisciplinary, case study approach, and drawing inspiration from public diplomacy, sociology, and psychology, this paper presents a theory of reputational vulnerability, which facilitates risk assessment and understanding of the intersecting dynamics of political polarisation and reputational erosion.
Neo-republicans claim that domination is an interpersonal dependence relationship. Others reply that structures should be more central to republican arguments. This paper analyses these criticisms. Neo-republicans respond that structures can indirectly facilitate interpersonal domination. However, we require a picture of how structures are in place, are reproduced, and impact individual behaviour. I use the idea of emergence to conceptualize this. Moreover, this idea illustrates how certain social macro-phenomena create disempowerment over and above interpersonal relations. Thus, I argue that emergent structures sometimes give rise to systemic domination, where an agent lacks freedom in relation to a diffuse multiplicity of agents.
Recent scholarship has shifted from analysing populist discourses to examining discourses about populism, what we term populism discourse studies, highlighting how the signifier "populism" is mobilised in struggles over political power. Focusing on Instituto Millenium, a business aligned think tank in Brazil, this article examines corporate anti-populism as a dimension of corporate political activity. It shows how corporate actors contributed to the mainstreaming of right-wing populism by framing Jair Bolsonaro's campaign as an economic solution to an alleged 'left-populist threat' associated with Lula and the Workers' Party. The study expands populism research by foregrounding business actors' role in shaping populism discourses.
This paper contributes to urban political theory by drawing on Foucault's concept of a 'micro-physics of power' and his genealogy of political rationality. Conceptually, it develops the notion of spatio-temporalization to reflect on the power of space and time; and genealogically, it examines the relationship between modern state formation and urbanization. Overall, the paper argues that the modern city emerges from a dialectical interplay of statist spatio-temporal homogenization and closure, and urban spatio-temporal heterogenization and initiation. This perspective enables to understand the unique political characteristics of city life and demonstrates the analytical value of space and time in political theory.
