Political Agency Research Articles

The Effectiveness of Social Communication in Creating a Conducive Atmosphere in Penajam Paser North District through Facilitation P4GN & PN

This research aims to determine the effectiveness of social communication in creating a conducive atmosphere in North Penajam Paser Regency through facilities for the Prevention, Eradication, Abuse and Illicit Trafficking of Narcotics and Narcotics Precursors (P4GN & PN). When this research was carried out, he met directly with the Head of the National Unity and Politics Agency through the Head of the Development of Iwasbang, Community Organizations and Economic, Social and Cultural Resilience. Apart from that, conducting interviews with several related sources such as the Health Service, PPU District Narcotics Agency (BNK), PPU District Prosecutor's Office, PPU 0913 Military District Command, PPU Cq Resort Police. Narcotics Unit, Bangun Mulya Village, Waru District. The negative impact resulting from drug abuse is very large, not only does it have an impact on physical health problems, but it also has an impact on psychological/mental health problems. Drug prevention and control efforts can be carried out in preventive or repressive ways. The existence of the North Penajam Paser Regency National Narcotics Agency is expected to be able to assess and suppress the still high level of drug abuse to the extent of the effectiveness of social communication in creating a conducive atmosphere in North Penajam Paser Regency through facilitating the prevention, eradication, abuse and illicit trafficking of narcotics and narcotics precursors (P4GN & PN).

The political: A view from Jakarta’s kampungs

This article is a response to Leitner and Sheppard’s recent publications on Jakarta. I argue that Jakarta’s kampungs and the eviction of their communities is a topic that needs to be situated in the realm of social reproduction. The multidimensional problems in kampungs fall within capitalism’s wider ‘crisis of care’. From this methodological position, we can access the political domain of the kampung, from which a new political agency emerges as collective bodies beyond merely the sum of individual survival tactics.

Ideological hope

ABSTRACT The hope for a better future can, and frequently does, motivate political action. Political hope is therefore often considered a positive force. However, not all forms of political hope are beneficial. Some scholars and activists claim that some kinds of hope also function as an ideology. I argue that we can give a precise meaning to the notion of ‘ideological hope,’ and I argue that to say of a given instance of hope that it is ‘ideological’ means more than that it is irrational or immoral. I distinguish two forms of ideological hope: forms where the ideological nature of hope derives from underlying ideological beliefs and judgments, and structural forms. The case of structurally ideological hope shows that even the rational hopes of political agents can undermine their purposes by binding them to distorted political self-understandings.

Communicating Europe: a computational analysis of the evolution of the European Commission’s communication on Twitter

Social media is an important means of communication for political agencies, which makes it possible to engage with large sectors of the public. For institutions which are not directly elected by voters, such as the European Commission (EC), social media can be a strategic tool for increasing perceived legitimacy and citizen engagement, especially in contexts of high politicization. In this paper, we use natural language processing techniques to provide a comprehensive overview of how EC communication on Twitter has evolved between 2010 and 2022, with respect to both its topics and its style. Our analyses show that, over time, the focus of EC communication has shifted substantially from economy-, finance- and governance-related topics, towards social policy, digital and environmental policy, and identity. These changes have progressively differentiated the EC’s profile from that of other institutions (especially more technocratic ones) and contributed to better alignment with engagement patterns of its social media audience. In addition, EC communication has become less neutral (in favor of more positive sentiment), simpler, and more readable, all features which are associated with more accessible and engaging messaging. Yet, while the EC currently scores better than most other reference agencies on several descriptors of accessibility, its style is still lexically more complex, less concrete and less action-oriented than that of other institutions. Alongside providing novel insights on how the EC’s online communication and projected political identity have changed over time, this study lays the foundations for future experimental and hypothesis-driven work combining social media data with external data sources.

Knowing rape: Turning ethnoracialized victims into moral citizens in post‐apartheid South Africa

AbstractIn South Africa, a disparate coalition of law enforcement, human rights workers, health officials, and activists claim that women don't know they have been raped. Claims of misrecognition typically follow from the observation that most women who experience gendered violence in South Africa do not report to the police and are especially leveled at Black women living in rural areas under the judicial authority of customary leaders. This article examines this assertion about not knowing gendered violence and the interventions it inspired. Dwelling on the story of one survivor's search for justice in Thohoyandou, South Africa, I argue that in the years following the transition from apartheid to democracy, a consensus coalesced around Black Indigenous women, who were seen as key political agents in post‐colonial nation‐building. During this time, knowing rape was touted as a gendered civic duty, one that enacted moral citizenship for the sake of a more orderly, democratic and vigorous multicultural nation. In spite of the consensus around knowing rape, “rape,” I suggest, remains an ambivalent sign for both those who encourage its recognition and for survivors. Amidst these disjunctures, survivors’ demands for justice often go denied.

Protesting exile: Cretan refugee activists in the late Ottoman Empire

AbstractFocusing on the long aftermath of the July Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire, this article examines the intellectual and popular climate of protest in the context of a crisis of sovereignty over Crete. Keeping the geographical focus on İstanbul and on the regions receiving tens of thousands of civilians displaced from this Mediterranean island around the turn of the twentieth century, I discuss how multiple segments of a refugee population animated a mass protest movement. Pursuing a multi-class perspective, the article demonstrates how the mobilization of the displaced rested on the actions of mutually reinforcing social clusters: an upper-class cohort of Cretans based in İstanbul and more numerous but equally vocal underprivileged groups from the provinces. Approaching displacement as a condition that generates not only victimhood but also impetus for collective action, I argue that the displaced Cretans became the leading agents of mass politics in the post-revolutionary Empire.

"The Greatest and Most Important Human Right": Citizenship and Bureaucratic Indifference in Refugee-UNHCR Correspondence

This article examines how refugees advocate for themselves with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and what responses their communications engender. It analyzes letters sent by refugees in Kenya to UNHCR headquarters in Geneva between 1983 and 1994. The findings underline a disjuncture between refugees’ efforts to constitute themselves as political agents, and UNHCR’s insistence on viewing them as depoliticized subjects. The refugees perform citizenship vis-à-vis UNHCR, using their shared identity as a basis for collective claims-making and trying to renegotiate their unequal relationship with the international organization. To empower themselves, they adopt the international organization’s own refugee rights vocabulary and play off different organizations and layers of UNHCR against each other. UNHCR’s responses (or lack thereof) demonstrate the consequences of its insulation and bureaucratization. These insights are especially noteworthy in light of recent progress on meaningful refugee participation in the refugee regime.

Canta la Calle. Sonic affirmation and the politics of the carnivalesque in Cádiz

ABSTRACT This article combines ethnographic research and debates on cultural activism to challenge canonical views on carnival by positioning the festivity’s sonic dimension as an active force of placemaking that extends beyond the official timeframe of carnival. The paper centres on Cádiz, a Spanish city that celebrates one of the oldest and most influential carnivals of Southern Europe. Cádiz’s carnival is famous for the inventiveness of carnival groups made of local citizens who gather every year and dedicate months to prepare an original music repertoire. Seeking to expand our understanding of contemporary carnival, this article looks at how carnival in Cádiz has provided ground for a radical understanding of citizenship and political agency against neoliberal appropriations of the public space, as evident in the increasing weight of surveillance and gentrification. This article argues that carnival music provides a platform for radical ways of mobilising creativity to redefine placemaking.

Recovering the Democratic Value of Public Discourse

The decline of democracy in the US entails the surge of authoritarianism, ascendency of demagoguery, dispersal of the democratic majority, and weakening of public reason. Dissent, envisioned as a rhetorical practice of democratic deliberation, resists authoritarianism by advancing democratic values. Accordingly, this paper examines democracy as a minority voice, explores the deliberative capacity of dissent, and identifies the rhetorical properties of deliberation. The paper argues that dissent, in its fugitive aspect, is dispersed across an array of modest sites, guided by a deliberative ideal partially realised, and framed by democratic values. Dissent functions in this capacity as an itinerant, recurring source of democratic renewal on occasions of political crisis. It is an adaptation to structural constraints that provides a nurturing aspiration to prompt political agency, establish realistic expectations, and sustain vigilance. While the immediacy of the authoritarian threat and corresponding questions about the role of democratic communication are addressed in terms of the 2024 general election in the US, the democratic challenge in the US is indicative of the abiding immediacy of the authoritarian threat to other democracies and suggestive of deliberative adaptations for restoring the vitality of democratic communication and culture. Complacency in democratic theory and practice is counter-indicated.

What kind of political agency can foster radical transformation towards ecological sustainability?

What kind of political agency is necessary to foster radical political-economic transformations towards ecological sustainability? Focusing on the radical ecopolitical project of degrowth, this article starts from the observation that a prerequisite for degrowth policies to materialise is political agency that is bold and visionary yet pragmatic; agency that seeks radical change yet does so based on what is already in existence. To capture the nature of the ideal-typical political agent that could exercise this sort of agency, this article builds on scholarship on policy entrepreneurship to develop the concept of the radical bricoleur. It proposes that an important key to ‘radicalising’ the bricoleur lies in putting greater emphasis on Levi-Strauss’ (1966) pre-modern, holistic understanding of what kind of order it is that the bricoleur is seeking to rebuild. Doing so opens the way for redefining the goal of the bricoleur from being the reinstatement of the current capitalist and non-sustainable societal order, to being the reinstatement of an order defined by a logic of balance and harmony between and within humans, as well as humans and nature.

Women in Politics and the Public Sphere: Munich 1918/1919

Women have never been passive bystanders to the history being made around them and they have always found ways to contribute to shaping their world. Munich in 1918/1919 provides a useful site to examine women's experiences and roles due to the long-standing involvement of women in the peace movement and welfare work, as well as the foundation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic after the First World War. However, Munich in the early years of the Weimar Republic is most commonly associated with Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, an attempt by right-wing men to seize political power. Moreover, the 1918 revolution is also often told through the lens of male political figures. As a result, politics in the early twentieth century is easy to view as a male-dominated affair with women merely experiencing the effects of male political power. This era, particularly from the perspective of Munich, also becomes viewed through the lens of the rise of fascism, which obscures and distorts the alternative political visions many women held and worked towards. This article centres on women's experiences and roles in politics and the public sphere in revolutionary Munich to ask what opportunities the revolution and its immediate aftermath presented for women and how they were able to influence political decision-making despite huge barriers. Through an understanding of how their world was gendered, their role as political agents comes to the fore.

Rethinking Utopia as Form: Failure, Time, and the Political Subject of Anti-Capitalism

Abstract: This essay theorizes utopianism as distinct from radical or revolutionary action and so capable of instantiating a desire for a world so different it cannot be represented. Asking whether "failure" is in fact a productive condition of possibility for utopianism, the essay considers a number of theoretical interventions including those of Fredric Jameson and Kathi Weeks. Drawing out the benefits and limits of these perspectives, the essay articulates utopianism's features and offers the demand for prison abolition as an example. Not only does this demand confront the impossibility of a different world, but it draws on the potentiality of past political agency and so posits what occupying the "no place" of utopia can be for those who have historically been denied the very temporalities upon which utopia has traditionally relied.

Crisis as Method: Politics, Temporality, and Agency

This special issue demonstrates how theorizing the present in terms of crisis generates insights into contradictory experiences of historical time. The core questions addressed are these: What are the temporal forms through which crisis is expressed today, and what are the political implications? The contributors pay close attention to the nonsynchronicity and the discordance of times that constitute the present. The contributors ask how contemporary crisis can be better understood with reference to long-term and ongoing colonial and racial histories. This article functions as both an introduction to the special issue as well as a development of some of the key theoretical coordinates, first thinking through the relationship between crisis and everyday politics, disentangling crisis theory from its association with determinism, and then showing how crisis theory challenges conventional understandings of political agency. Recent work in Black studies offers significant ways of understanding how subaltern actors improvise and forge unfamiliar forms of agency in times of brutal constraint. With reference to this work, the article argues that understanding crisis not only as an “object” of study but as a “method” has generative implications for theorizing the present.

Beyond refugeeness: complex subjectivities in Palestinian refugee camps

ABSTRACT This article explores Palestinian refugeeness to argue for a more complex understanding of refugee subjectivity. The subjectivities of Palestinian refugees – and especially of those from the refugee camps – have been informed by their participation in national politics. Therefore, Palestinian refugees, while embodying experiences of violence, displacement and exclusion much like other refugee communities, have also been emphatically seen through their political agencies. In this article, I aim to complicate the emphasis on political subjectivity and explore Palestinian refugee subjectivity as complex, multidimensional, and contradictory. By narrating ethnographic encounters with two of my interlocutors, I demonstrate that subjectivities emerge not only from their politicized position as Palestinian refugees nor from the camp spaces they dwell in but from their complex and mundane relationalities that are neither static nor coherent. By emphasizing this fluid complexity, the aim is to acknowledge refugee subjectivities as multidimensional and fragile formations imbued with internal tensions that emerge from multiple and contradictory desires and from a sense of self that is not reducible to refugeeness.

Post-Merger Political and Social Dynamics: Fata's Shifting Paradigm in Pakistan

This research analyzes the perceptions and experiences of individuals from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) following its merger with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). The study employs a mixed approach, collecting primary data through random sampling from various districts of FATA, including students, teachers, social activists, politicians, and government servants. The analysis reveals a divided sentiment regarding the merger, with nearly half of the respondents expressing dissatisfaction. Major concerns include the lack of improvement in governance, ineffective law enforcement, and worsening security conditions. The traditional Jirga system is still preferred over the new judicial framework by a majority, highlighting cultural and practical considerations. Findings indicate that the merger has not achieved its desired outcomes, with the Deputy Commissioners operating similarly to the previous Political Agents, and the former Levies and Khasadars remaining ineffective as a police force. Policy recommendations emphasize the need for honoring merger-related promises and improving peace and security.

“The Citizen” as a Ghost Subject in Co-Producing Smart Sustainable Cities: An Intersectional Approach

The importance and benefits of engaging citizens as co-producers of urban transformation have been increasingly recognised. However, the mere implementation of citizen co-production does not guarantee more legitimate or inclusive policy decisions and outcomes, especially when power inequalities that shape local decision-making remain unaddressed. This article examines the transformative potential of citizen co-production in smart sustainable city initiatives using two successive citizen panels in Trondheim, Norway, as cases. The study aimed to understand the role of citizen co-production in these panels, and the notion of “the citizen” within their frameworks. Three challenges with co-production were identified. Firstly, the ad-hoc nature of citizen engagement emphasised individual participation rather than facilitating collective spaces from which political agency could emerge. Secondly, citizens’ viewpoints were perceived as uninformed preferences that could be transformed through professional guidance. This, coupled with the closed nature of the initiatives, raises questions about the transformative potential of the processes, particularly in challenging the underlying premises of citizen co-production shaped by a neoliberal discourse of smart sustainable cities. The article concludes with a call to analyse citizen co-production spaces through an intersectional lens that attends to relational understandings of power dynamics and identities. This analysis should not only consider who participates, but also how “the citizen” as a subject is conceptualised and mobilised, how citizens’ interests and knowledge are taken into account, and the political significance of their involvement.

Frontier Strategies of Dayak Agabag’s Elite for Cultural Rights in Ulu Sembakung, North Borneo

The local elites of Dayak Agabag are conscious of their community's position as minorities, which presents opportunities. As an Indonesian frontier people, the Dayak Agabag have formed solid social ties with the Murut Pensiangan, as a resident community in Malaysia, fostering cultural cohesion across national borders. These sociocultural ties are seen as a threat to sovereignty and nationalism, which, ironically, are often exploited by local elites for the benefit of frontier people. The Agabag's elites are using their minority status to advocate the development of modern-state infrastructure in their region. This article analyzes cultural rights challenges confronting the Dayak Agabag along the Indonesia-Malaysia border, aiming to comprehend the political role of Dayak Agabag elites in shaping affirmative policies for marginalized communities and their advocacy for human rights, shedding light on the movements of both the elite and the community in their quest for legitimacy. The ethnographic lens used in this article shows that the political agency of Dayak Agabag’s local elite created their own rule to counter the domination of the state spatiality to struggle for human rights as frontier people. This article describes how the local elites maintained their minority frontier people status, as it gave them access to political gain or privileges across state borders. The local agency of Dayak Agabag’s elite offers insight into how marginalized frontier people can leverage their political indigeneity power, obtain cultural rights, and maintain socially legitimate yet formally illegal cross-border mobility.

Weakness of Political Will

In this paper I provide a preliminary account of weakness of political will (political akrasia). My aim is to use theories from the weakness of will literature as a guide to develop a model of the same phenomenon as it occurs in collective agents. Though the account will parallel the traditional view of weakness of will in individuals, weakness of political will is a distinctly political concept that will apply to group agents such as governments, institutional actors, and other political collectives. I further argue that blaming inaction by collective political agents on a “lack of political will” should be understood as blaming a kind of akratic break within the deliberative process, leading to an inability of the collective agent to capitalize on existing group attitudes in order to translate them into policy or legislation. My primary example throughout will be U.S. political inaction with respect to the climate crisis.

Migrants’ community building in two Montenegrin informal neighborhoods

ABSTRACT This research aims to benefit displaced people due to conflict in Kosovo and their commitment to community building in two Montenegrin informal neighborhoods. Drawing on qualitative data from observations, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews, the author examines the potential for urban cohesion through inhabitation and political agency in the urban-occupied territories attributed to the physical and social qualities of neighborhoods. Urban cohesion involves feelings of trust, gathering, acceptance, and connectedness, while political agency entails the broadest and freest access to community tools. The consequence is a communal building that opposes dependence on the leadership of the elected representatives. Proponents of residents’ trust in the effective leadership of local elected officials and community representatives promote productive community development. Since evidence of the efficacy of this model is lacking in Montenegro, this article seeks to address inhabitants’ engagement with political parties, leading toward communal consciousness.

Political Invisibility: Structural Realism and The Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Nation

This research critically examined the intersection of structural realism, normativity, and political invisibility, with a particular focus on its implications for peripheral actors in international relations (IR), exemplified by the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Nation. Based on the assumption that structural realism governs Western foreign policy, the research investigated the possibility of political invisibility not as an indication of weakness but as a strategic method for political liberation. Through a theoretical analysis that contrasted the normative assumptions of structural realism with critical theory, a qualitative methodology, integrating a critical literature review and a case study analysis were employed in the research in order to dissect the dynamics of political invisibility and its potential as an emancipatory force. The results indicated that political invisibility, when utilised effectively, can function as a subversive instrument enabling marginalised actors such as the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Nation to maneuver through and capitalise on the normative oversights of structural realism. This subversion challenges conventional IR perspectives by demonstrating how marginalised groups can assert agency and sovereignty despite systemic exclusion from central dialogues and decision-making processes. The scientific novelty of this study lay in its focused critique of structural realism through the lens of political invisibility and the politics of refusal, offering a unique perspective on the agency of peripheral actors in IR. Its practical significance emerges from the potential applications of these insights in fostering a more inclusive and equitable global political discourse, emphasising the strategic potential of invisibility for political mobilisation and emancipation. By positioning political invisibility as a catalyst for emancipatory politics, this research contributed to a broader discourse on power dynamics within IR, challenging established norms and suggesting a paradigm shift towards recognising and leveraging the political agency of marginalised actors.